What is Truth?

A Dutch pensioner has begun a legal battle to have his birth certificate changed. He wants to be recognised as being just 49 years old, although his actual age is 69 years years old. His argument is that if transgender people can decide which sex they want to be, in spite of the physical evidence, so he should have the right to change his date of birth. He says he feels 20 years younger and that his biological age is only 45. At the younger age he has more opportunities, including getting dates on Tinder! He feels he is discriminated against because of his age. He states,

“Transgenders can now have their gender changed on their birth certificate, and in the same spirit there should be room for an age change.”

A further argument he uses is that the national finances would be helped as he would be renouncing his pension until he reaches retirement age again. A judge has commented that there would be legal problems with this idea as it would mean legally deleting part of their lives.i But what about the truth?

A thirty year old Iranian asylum seeker has been removed from an Ipswich school where he was enrolled in year 11 because he is thought to be around 30 years old. Another boy, thought to be his younger brother has also been removed from his class in year 7.ii The truth seems to be that they lied about their dates of birth.

A paedophile wants to have previous convictions recorded against him deleted; he says that record it is against his human rights. The truth is he wants to change history for his own benefit.

What is truth and can it be changed?

Truth is most often defined as a concept that is in accord with fact or reality. The question is, ‘whose reality” or ‘who is the determinant of fact?’ Many politicians or people in authority throughout history have tried to change history by rewriting the records, but they cannot alter the truth of what actually happened. Many defendants in court cases have tried to reinvent their role in events and try to invent false alibis and evidence to support their new story. Yet the role of the police and the courts is to unravel the truth of what actually happened. Truth must be an absolute concept and cannot be changed, although our perception of it can be altered in many ways. Thus our perception of the truth may be flawed or limited. Any misunderstanding will come either from inadequate data or from a bias in the reasoning process.

When Isaac Newton described the effect of gravity in enabling planets to circulate round the sun, he was accurate enough for his calculations to be used to take men to the moon but his understanding of this truth cannot account for events occurring near the speed of light. For this Einstein’s understanding of relativity is closer to the truth. Truth must be an absolute concept that we are trying to discover using all the evidence available.

Many modern societies have in practice killed off God, not that he has actually died but we have treated him as if he were dead. This exclusion is however associated with inevitable effects. With the death of God comes the death of truth as an absolute concept with grave consequences. The oligarch, whether Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Putin or Trump can define truth to be what they want it to be, what they perceive to be in their interest. So long as the media can engineer a consensus so ‘truth’ can be manipulated.

Religious Truth

Just as the search for ‘truth’ in the realm of science, medicine and law is fundamental, so it should be in the realm of philosophy and religion. Logical thought is the basis of philosophy; although the conclusions that are reached depend on the starting assumptions. Religious faith provides these starting assumptions – in this regard atheism is as much a religion as Christianity.

Most people acknowledge that instinctively they believe in values, that good and evil exist and that honesty, love, kindness and integrity are real virtues, to be cherished and taught. Yet moral values cannot be be derived from science which, by definition, limits itself to materialistic investigation. The Nobel Prize winner, Peter Medawar concluded in his book,’Advice to a Young Scientist,’

“The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with the first and last things. - questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’ ‘What are we here for?’ ‘What is the point of living?’iii

All science can do is analyse how the world works and discovers laws or principles that order what goes on. Science cannot go further. Laws of science have no creative power. It is therefore nonsense to say that science has disproved the need for God.

I asked a group of youngsters if they could define what a ‘crooked line’ was. They correctly concluded that it was one that isn’t ‘straight’. Similarly evil is a thought or action that is not good. We instinctively feel there is a real difference between good and evil. But if you ask people why they have come to this conclusion most will find it difficult to answer. Values such as good and evil have to have come from somewhere. Either they are just man-made and therefore arbitrary and open to change or they come from God and are part of his character that he has instilled into us. It is significant that the Bible teaches that we have been made in God’s image so something of his nature could be passed on to us.

I once asked a group of hospital consultants how they would define truth. After some discussion one concluded, ‘It must be consensus.’ But the fallacy of this became clear when the morality of Hitler’s Nazi Germany was discussed. Hitler had the consensus of the majority of people but the consultants all agreed that that did not make Nazi thinking or ideology right.

Without God, anything goes and the strong control even the morality of society. It is only because there is a supreme being who will judge us that all the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and the genocides in Ruanda, Sudan and Bosnia are wrong.

Nietzsche derided people as ‘odious windbags of progressive optimism, who think it is possible to have Christian morality without Christian faith.’ In his book ‘Twilight of the Idols’ he wrote,

“They are rid of the Christian God, and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pull;s the right to christian morality from under one’s feet.”

This point was brilliantly put in a debate where an analogy between our reliance on God and on air was made – both are invisible but essential for life.

“Imagine a person who comes in here tonight and argues, ‘No air exists,’ but continues to breathe air while he argues. Now intellectually, atheists continue to breathe – they continue to use reason and draw scientific conclusions (which assume an orderly universe), to make moral judgments (which assume absolute values) but the atheistic view of things would in theory make such ‘breathing’ impossible. They are breathing God’s air all the time they are arguing against him.”iv

This pressure to leave God out of our thinking is very dangerous for society. Dostoevsky wrote in ‘Brothers Karamozov’:

“Is there no God? Then everything is permitted.”

Jesus make some astounding claims about himself. He claimed to be the only way for mankind’s relationship with God to be restored, that he alone is the doorway to heaven. He claimed to be the incarnation of God, to be one with His Father in heaven. He even put himself as the ultimate arbiter of truth; in other words he was calling himself as God.

“I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father but through me.” John 14:6

One of the most common phrases used by Jesus was,

“Truly I say to you . . .”

This word ‘truly’ comes 82 times in the gospels alone, most commonly by Jesus when he says something important. Either Jesus is speaking the truth or not.

Evidence for the Truth

Any claim to truth should be supported by corroborating evidence. With regard to Jesus there is excellent objective evidence that can be analysed and discussed. Did Jesus not fulfil the 330 Old Testament prophecies about the coming Messiah, God’s eternal King? Did he really rise from the dead? Were his disciples genuinely convinced about his claims from the evidence of his life? They were willing to die for him, after all. Are the New Testament documents reliable? Why did the early church grow so rapidly in spite of persecution both from the Jewish and Roman authorities? These questions can all be investigated.

Lee Strobel was a journalist who was extremely sceptical about the Christian claims. He wanted to disprove them. However a detailed search led him to the opposite conclusion, that Jesus is the God who created us and is therefore able to forgive the sin that separates us from God. He wrote the best seller, ‘The Case for Christ.’

Frank Morrison was another author who determined to disprove the foundations of the Christian faith. He wrote,

“When, as a young man, I first began seriously to study the life of christ, I did so with a very definite feeling that, if I may so put it, His history rested upon very insecure foundations.”v

However as he sifted through all the evidence his conclusions changed. He wrote in the preface of his book, ‘Who Moved the Stone,’

‘The book as it was originally planned was left high and dry, like those Thames barges when the great river goes out to meet the incoming sea. The writer discovered one day that not only could he no longer write the book as he had once conceived it, but that he would not if he could.”vi

Jesus himself repeatedly refers to the evidence for his claims. In John’ gospel, chapter 5 Jesus talks about the evidence of his own statements, the evidence of John the Baptist, the evidence of his miracles, the fact that his heavenly Father had directly spoken about him both at his baptism and transfiguration, and then there are all the Scriptures about the Messiah that he fulfils. On top of this Jesus’ teaching about the problem of our sin resonates with us and he says this is the problem he came to solve. In John 8 he states that his resurrection will be the final proof of his claims to be God in the flesh.

Furthermore there is the subjective evidence of our inner thinking and feelings. Why does the character of Jesus attract people to him? Does he not characterise those values that we cherish? Another strong argument is the effect Jesus has on his followers. Their lives do change for good. They were willing to die for him. Jesus recognised that what people really believe affects the way they live. He said,

“By their fruit you shall recognise them.” Matthew 7:20

When he said this he was criticising pseudo-religious people, the Pharisees. But he might just as well be describing the effect that selfish egotism has on the behaviour of all people, whether politicians, business men or ordinary people. The quality of our lives reflects the faith we live by. A creed that excludes God often results in lives that are selfish. Jesus teaches us that we will all be judged by God when we die and the basis of this judgment will be whether our faith has changed our lives to live as he wants. Paul Johnson has written a brilliant book that describes the disturbing private lives of many influential thinkers such as Rousseau, Shelley, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, all of whom who have rejected God. This powerfully demonstrates the link between beliefs and morality.vii

There is little evidence to support the claims of any other prophets who claim to speak for God since Jesus. The most important question we all need to answer is whether Jesus is indeed the Messiah of God and therefore whether what he teaches is true. Jesus says that our eternal destiny depends on our choice. If he is not, what else is true that we can live our lives by?

BVP

iDaily Telegraph, Thursday 8th November 2018 p.18

iiDaily Telegraph, Thursday 8th November 2018 p.11

iiiPeter Medawar, ‘Advice to a Young Scientist’Harper and Row, London 1979 p.31

ivBahnsen G, ‘Propositional Apologetics sated and Defended’ United States: American Vision, 2010

vFrank Morrison, ‘Who Moved the Stone?’ Faber and Faber 1930 p. 9

viFrank Morrison, ‘Who Moved the Stone?’ Faber and Faber 1930 Preface

viiPaul Johnson, ‘Intellectuals’, George Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988