Does Truth Exist and Can We Know It?

Although I touched briefly on this issue in my article on intolerance, I thought it would be good to take a closer look at some of the relativistic, postmodern claims about truth that sometimes hold people back from discovering or embracing the truth of Christianity. In our postmodern society, it's very popular to claim that truth is not absolute - there is no one unified truth that applies to everyone and all of reality. Instead some people - including some very intelligent people - believe that truth is relative to the perspective of each person. You can have your truth, and I can have mine. 

Given the climate of political correctness and also the clamour from the tolerance movement for all perspectives to be accepted as equally valid, it is no surprise that this view of truth is popular. It is an inclusive view of truth. I can be right, you can be right, everyone can be equally right, even if what we believe about life or the universe is completely opposite to one another. 

The most obvious example of opposing views is the theist-atheist debate about the existence of God. If there is no objective truth that applies to everybody and describes the reality of the entire universe, then both views are equally valid, or in effect, equally true.

This should immediately ring our nonsense-alarm bells. How can it be true that God exists and also that God doesn't exist at the same time? Of course this is wrong - it's a logical impossibility. It is one of the foundational laws of human thought (known as the Law of Non-Contradiction) that something cannot be both true and not true at the same time.

Both worldviews could be wrong (perhaps not about God's existence, which seems to be a binary issue - either God exists or he doesn't) but it is impossible for both worldviews to both be correct. The idea that there is no singular, objective truth that explains all of reality, but that instead truth is fractured and subjective violates logic by asking us to accept contradictory claims. Clearly one singular truth must exist.

As a primary school teacher, the clearest example I see of this in my day job is in teaching mathematics. You learn over the years to analyse the incorrect answers a student gives to a maths problem to try and work out what mistake they have made, allowing you to correct a misunderstanding or procedural error. One day as I was doing this while marking some maths work, it dawned on me that there a potentially infinite number of incorrect answers a student can give to every maths equation, but only one correct answer.

This is the nature of truth, it is exclusive rather than inclusive. There can only be one correct answer to the questions "is there a God?" and "how did the universe come into existence?" - but an infinite number of incorrect theories. Objective truth in mathematics indicates the existence of objective truth in other domains of life.

Another important step is to test the claim that objective truth does not exist in reference to itself, and doing this creates an enormous problem for relativists. This is because the claim "Objective truth does not exist" is an objective truth claim itself! If there is no absolute truth that applies to everybody, then the claim "there is no absolute truth" can't be an absolute truth that applies to everybody. It is a self-refuting statement.

Clearly objective truth exists, on the basis of logic and the self-refuting incoherence of the subjective truth hypothesis.

The other claim sometimes made at this point is that even if there is an objective truth about the universe, it is unknowable. Our finite and limited senses are unable to perceive or locate absolute truth and therefore we should abandon the search. 

This is where the Correspondence Theory of truth comes in. This is a description or theory of truth that we all use intuitively use every day. If there is a chair in my loungeroom, and I say "There is a chair in my loungeroom", then that statement is true, because my words correspond with a feature of reality. If I say there is no chair, then there is no correspondence, and I have not spoken the truth. 

On this understanding of truth, I can know if things are true or not if they correspond to the realities of the universe - things that can be demonstrated empirically, sensed physically, implied evidentially and inferred deductively. Truth is not a mysterious, elusive, undiscoverable substance. It is the correspondence of thought to reality. 

It might take some effort on my behalf to do the required groundwork and discover the truth about a particular hypothesis or historical event, but if my thoughts correspond to the realities of the evidence then I can know what is true beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's my contention here that Christianity is objectively true. Objective truth must exist, and it can be discovered and known as we sort through the ideas and theories to see which one best corresponds with the observable features of reality. Christianity does this better than any other worldview, and I hope you'll keep checking back here or follow the Recommended Website links at the bottom of my website to investigate this claim further.