It's clear throughout that, I hope, that I still believe in Absolute Truth. God is not "the source of" Truth, but rather something that is, I believe, true. Truth is internal, rather than external - that is, it is the belief that something is ....
What?
We can't really define what Truth is, because to do so requires other words that all mean similar ideas to Truth.
We can give examples of Truth. We know that when we throw an apple up in the air, it comes down and hits the ground. The effects of gravity are true, and will always be true. Regardless of what we know about gravity, how it's created, how it works, its effects are demonstrably true.
We know it's true because we see it with our own eyes. We feel it with our own heads when apples fall from trees onto us. I've never had an apple fall on my head, but let me tell you a little story...
When I was probably 12, during the summer, I went to a summer cookout with my church. For some reason that escapes me now, they had a piñata. They put a blindfold on my head so that I could not see, and gave me a stick with which to hit the piñata, and pointed me in a direction. Before I took my first swing, I *felt* gravity in a very real and very powerful way, as most of the tree branch - somehow missing the last few feet connected to the tree and, therefore, the piñata, but the rest of the branch beyond the piñata - came crashing down. Two hundred pounds of dry lumber split open my left side like a gutted fish. Had I been just a hair further left, that'd be a very terminal point to the story.
Gravity, I'm certain, is true. And yes, you know it is from feeling, too, for you know you can't jump too high or too far, you can't throw a ball into space, you can't float through the clouds without a giant metal machine holding you aloft, and that only briefly.
For many people, that's the end of the story on truth. Things are true only if we can demonstrate them, or at least imagine a test that could be performed on them.
In a world of absolutes, everything that cannot be true is a falsehood. Ergo, if God cannot be proven true, God must be false.
Christianity actually benefits from a more murky definition of truth than that, because the very idea of a God cannot be proven and, therefore, can never be demonstrable. This is, I think, the difference between Fundamentalist Christianity and Fundamentalist Atheism - a difference in the definition of where truth comes from. What is true for the former always descends from God, and therefore all proofs must come from God. For the latter, what is true must always descend from observation, and therefore all proofs must be observable.
But God never said that all truth comes from Him, and we have the ability to imagine truths that cannot be observed. If, for instance, there are multiple universes, as some scientists believe to be the case, we may never be able to observe them, because we may never be able to set foot outside of our own. We are, by our nature, creatures created by a single universe, a universe whose laws are favorable to us but also inhibit us from becoming more than the sum of those laws.
I think God is true, because I have seen things that are best explained by "God," such as dreams coming literally and precisely true, without the need for interpretation. But I also think science is true, because when I test something in the laboratory, it works time and time again, and the only times it fails are when I've failed in my precision.
The only way both God and not-God can be true is if the concept of truth is murky.
Let's go back to the circle metaphor from the previous post...
If Absolute Truth is a red dot in the center of some kind of field, that field is multidimensional and unknown - that is, we don't know the size of the field any more than we know the size of the universe. We know the size of the observable universe, which is limited by the speed of light, the rate of expansion, and the time since the Big Bang, but we don't know the total size of the universe beyond what we can see. The universe gets bigger for us every second, as more light from further away makes it to our eyes.
In the same way, the field upon which Absolute Truth lies is unmeasurable and vast. We have no idea where its edges are. We could have a map to the spot of Absolute Truth that says it is "5 billion miles from the southwest corner," but we don't know where that corner is or even have a compass to tell us which way is southwest.
We know where we are. But we don't know where we are in relation to everything else. And thus, every reading we take is necessarily flawed by the fact that we don't know what those readings mean in relation to Absolute Truth.
Allow me one more scientific example... in the early days of nuclear chemistry - and this was not that long ago! - we thought that the atom was a kind of pudding, with protons interspersed throughout. In more recent days, we saw the center of the atom containing the protons and neutrons, and then electrons occupying very specific positions around it. Now, our idea of electrons around that center is more cloudesque.
In each case, we thought we had the truth, but as our instruments got better and better, we learned that we had been mistaken in the previous case. We will, someday, upset even what we think we know now about atoms, although I think our understanding is very, very good now. But part of the problem is that we don't know what questions to ask. We have to stumble upon those questions.
Why? Because we don't already know the truth about any of this. If we did, we could say "here's how to get to that point from where we're at now." But we don't - we are stumbling around, blindly. Every once in a while, we realize that, in our stumbling, we've fallen on something profoundly different than what we expected, and it challenges our ideas.
The same thing held true 2000 years ago in the Bible. The Pharisees and Sadducees believed they knew everything there was to know about the law, and they were very, very good at understanding it. And then Christ came along and told them that everything they knew about the law was wrong. Not because the law was wrong, but because they weren't asking the right questions about it.
For example, when they told Christ that He couldn't heal anyone on the Sabbath because that was working on the Sabbath. He corrected them:
Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”In the same way, we've become Pharisees today, proclaiming loudly what we know about the Bible and insisting people follow it exactly our way. But in so doing, we proclaim that all Truth is settled, and that we know it all. We deny ourselves the ability to grow and to discover new ways of interpreting the Scripture and understanding God. We also deny the Spirit, if the Spirit helps us to interpret (which I think He can, even if the Scripture doesn't say He does, but I hesitate to stand on that more strongly because to proclaim something is the responsibility of the Spirit when it's not is blasphemy - all we CAN say is that the Spirit helps us by giving us the gifts and fruits of the Spirit), because by proclaiming a single truth, we do not open our hearts to any new truths that the Spirit might want to teach us.
The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”
When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing. (Luke 13:14-17)
This is a lesson for all people who believe firmly that Truth is set in stone: it might be, but you can't know it, and by thinking you do, you limit yourself from learning more. Scientists cannot discover new things if they think they already know everything. Christians cannot, either.
In the words of Neil Degrasse Tyson from one of the most touching moments of the new Cosmos series:
“It’s OK not to know all the answers; It’s better to admit our ignorance, than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what’s really there.”
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