Truth

About 12 years ago I engaged in some lengthy dialogue with a fellow graduate student who had abandoned his Christian faith upon reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Below is one of the emails I sent to “Oleg” (not his real name).

Dear “Oleg”

Please allow me to begin by first expressing my profoundest sorrow over the terrible experiences you have been through. I cannot possibly understand the hurt and anguish these things have caused you. I can only say how sorry I am that this has happened to you and that I hope that in spite of it all, you are able to clearly distinguish between the wickedness of the persons that took advantage of you and the goodness of the God they so poorly represented in your case. My heart truly ached within me when I read your email. I know these words of mine may not mean that much, and certainly they can’t erase your personal history or the present feelings that history may yet arouse within you, but please know that I truly and deeply hurt for you because of this. 

I also want to apologize for taking so long to send a response to your last two emails. Despite the passage of so much time, I still, regrettably, have no elaborate treatise to offer you in defense of my position. I have no knock-down argument to give to you. And truthfully, my suspicion is that given the rather lofty standard of evidence you have raised for justifiable belief in God (namely, a theophany), there is not much I can say that you will likely find especially compelling. Nevertheless, I will try. 

Believe it or not, being labeled as false is not the worst thing that can be said about a religion. Instead, the worst thing that one can say about a religion is that its central claims have no epistemic merit whatever, and therefore that it is neither true or false, just irrelevant. Such a religion would be literally meaningless, along the order of a UFO cult, or worse. A meaningless declaration like Noam Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is neither true nor false because it does not advance any statement about anything. Such a statement is simply hollow. In contrast, even though it may be false to say “it is raining” on a perfectly cloudless day, it is not meaningless to say so for the simple reason that “it is raining” is a proposition that has content which can be affirmed as either true or false. 

We can see, therefore, that there are three kinds of statements in view here: true, false, and meaningless. For a statement to be true or false,one must be able to measure such a statement against that which obtains in reality itself. The statement, “For the first time in history, the Houston Texans own a .500 record ten games into a season,” is a true statement (Note: I originally wrote this essay in 2007). It corresponds with reality, which is what it means for something to be true. The statement, “the New England Patriots have the worst won-loss percentage in the NFL this year,” is a false statement. It fails to correspond with reality. One is true and the other false, but neither the statement about the Texans nor the one about the Patriots is meaningless. Each has content that can be judged to either correspond with reality (true) or not (false). 

The truth claims of Christianity presuppose that (1) truth exists, that (2) it is defined as that which corresponds to reality, and (3) that is knowable. One could communicate the gospel of Christ in the most eloquent fashion only to have your audience retort that they do not even believe in truth itself, not to mention the truth claims of the Bible. In the first century, Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Today, many respond “There is no truth,” or that “All truth is relative.” Such deconstuctionist ideas must be addressed.

First, it is undeniable that truth exists. For to claim that “There is no truth” is to say either a) it is true that there is no truth or b) since there is no truth then the statement itself is not true. Either way the statement is false. Furthermore, the statement itself minimally implies the truths of being (someone existed who made the statement), time (“there” is uttered before “is” and “is” before “no,” etc.), and unity (four separate and distinct words conveying one thought). Thus, the statement “There is no truth” is self-defeating and loaded with implicit truths that contradict its own claim.

Second, when the Christian claims that the Bible is true, he is claiming that its propositions correspond to the way things really are. For instance, the Bible claims there really is a God, who really created man, that man really is sinful and can really find redemption only in Christ. Thus, if the nature of truth is anything except “that which corresponds to reality,” then the Bible’s claims are empty. Furthermore, Christian truths could not “trump” falsehoods from other religions, for falsehood does not exist apart from the correspondence view. Ironically, all non-correspondence views (pragmatism, feelings, coherence, etc.) implicitly claim to correspond to reality. In other words, rival views must employ the correspondence view in order to deny it, which means correspondence is undeniably true. The Christian apologist should also point out that all truth, if it is true, is exclusive and absolute by nature regardless of whether it is 2+2=4 or the deity of Christ. Because of the very nature of truth itself, the claims of Christianity are no more exclusive and absolute than any other truth claims, religious or non. 

Third, the Christian should demonstrate that not only does truth undeniably exist and that the correspondence theory is undeniably true, but also that truth is undeniably knowable. The agnostic might concede the first two points, but then reject the knowability of truth. By claiming that truth cannot be known, however, the agnostic has made a truth claim. Thus, his position is self-defeating. Furthermore, one must know some truth about reality in order to claim that no one can know truth about reality. Again, agnosticism is hung by a noose of its own making. It is legitimate to question how man knows or how much man knows, but it is self-defeating to question if man knows.