It all started with academics, those people who hang out in universities. I am one of them.
The academics speculated,
correctly, that truth is a creation of the human mind. More accurately, it is
the creation of a group of human minds agreeing on a statement or a story.
Because truth statements are human
creations, they are subject to error. More troubling is that truth can so often
be used as a weapon to dominate someone else. This insight has become the basis
of an intellectual movement labeled "postmodernism." Postmodernism agrees
with the following statement: "Whenever someone claims to be speaking the
truth, look out, because that someone is angling to get power over someone
else."
The statement can easily be oversimplified
to saying that there is no such thing as truth. Such misinterpretation leads
people to reject any statement made by academics.
What
is Truth?
We have to have truth. So we need a
definition of truth. I go to mathematics.
In geometry, we speak of a plane as
a surface with width and length but no depth. There is no such thing in
reality. But the idea is useful.
The concept of god or God is useful
in the same way. I define truth as "the story the way God (or the gods)
would tell it."
Truth is a quality of a story. Did
the criminal intend to kill the victim? We may never know, but somewhere there
is a truth: either the criminal did or did not intend to kill the victim. We
have a tool to try to determine which story is true, the jury trial. We know
that juries can be wrong, but they are the best we have.
In other areas, science plays the
same role. Is the vaccine safe? It is or it isn't. We use observation and peer
review to try to determine which story is true. Those tools can be wrong, but
they are the best we have.
A third source, which supplements both
jury trials and science, is testimony. We accept some people's story as true
because we trust those people. Jurors trust witnesses. Scientists trust other
scientists. Religious people trust their faith leaders. Politicians trust their
pollsters.
Which brings us to Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump claims that the 2000
election was stolen. Either it was or it wasn't. The truth is the story that
God would tell. We use science and testimony to try to determine which story is
true.
We have used a combination of
scientific observation of how the voting process is carried out and testimony
of people who were involved in the voting process. Out of those two sources we
have concluded that the story that God would tell is that the election was not
stolen. We could be wrong. We have claimed to speak the truth, but watch out,
we may be angling to get power over you.
The durability of the story that
Mr. Trump tells is based on two things: the reality that many people do not
understand the value of science, and the ease with which stories, true or
false, can be propagated by social media. We combine those two facts with the
danger that Mr. Trump and the people who testify in his defense are angling to
get power, the power of government. He can correctly argue that people who
oppose him are also angling to get power. Which is true? Which story would God
tell?
Truth
and Faith
I am a professionally religious
person--I make my living from religion. My faith, Roman Catholicism, claims to
speak the truth. Our claim is one of the reasons why academics say that people
who claim to speak the truth are often angling to get power. We have a sad
history of popes and other church leaders who have used power in very
unfortunate ways.
The Catholic church leadership
still uses power. If I state something publicly that goes against church
teaching, I can be out of a job. That is power.
Catholic tradition has put too much
weight on what we call "natural law." The term implies that there are
certain stories that everyone accepts as true, and that anyone who does not
accept the stories is either ignorant or is lying.
But there are no such stories.
History is full of examples of stories that everyone thought were true but were
later judged not to be true. One example from Christian (and Jewish and Muslim)
tradition is that charging interest on loans leads to bad outcomes and is
therefore evil. It was not until the 1400s or 1500s that most Christian
communities accepted the alternate story: under some conditions, charging
interest on loans will not lead to evil outcomes and is therefore permissible.
We are human beings, not gods. We
cannot tell the story that God would tell. We can only grope towards the true
story.
And once we think we have some
grasp of the story that God would tell, we enrich our knowledge with our love
of other people and of the creation that God has given us. We do the best we
can not to use truth to get power over others.
For a fine reflection on the
relationship between truth and love, I suggest reading Pope Benedict XVI's 2009
letter "Caritas in Veritate," ("Love joined with Truth"),
available on the Vatican website. Benedict does not discuss definitions of
truth. He asks us to reflect on the beautiful things that love can produce when
it merges with and enriches truth. including scientific truth.
