Truth

In a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian, I reminded him that the Bible says, in 1 John 4:1, "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world."

In response to this, he said, "Of course we need to do that to everyone else's claims. But, it is heresy to suggest that we apply that same criticism to the Bible."

I have heard Christians claim that it is their god-given duty to protect the Truth.

In a forum, I met a man who believed it was his duty, in spite of his own desires, to sit in that forum all day of everyday and argue with people, insisting on the truth, and pointing out where others got it wrong.

I have been exposed to the attitude that Christians can see the truth that the rest of the world is too distracted, or too sinful, or just too unwilling to see.

This has left me asking: What is truth?

The question is not about what is true. It is not about the subject of truth. It is a question about the nature of truth itself.

Is truth a rare gem that must be hidden or protected? Is it something sacred that can be damaged or desecrated? Is it something that can somehow go unexperienced? Is it a possession of any one person or group of people?

In church as a teenager, I was taught to look critically at the beliefs of other religious groups and at the claims of the sciences. The holes in their claims and practices were pointed out to me. I learned that other people have a profound capacity to be bamboozled by attractive ideas.

In this way, I learned how to critically and objectively observe the truth.

I learned that truth was something we could see when we honestly and critically looked at the evidence available to us. I could pick out the truth if I was willing to dissect and test the ideas of a group, not as an insistent proponent of those ideas, but as a ruthless skeptic and critic of them.

Truth, I learned, is the evidence left when I have stripped away the biases, expectations and beliefs I carried with me.

Then, after learning that lesson well, I turned around. I applied the same scrutiny to my own religion. I looked at Christianity with the same skeptical lens I had learned to use on other people's beliefs.

I absolutely appreciate that observation can be wrong. I believe there are optical illusions that can easily deceive us. That is precisely why determined criticism and skepticism are important in discovering truth. More often than not, our own beliefs and expectations create the blind spots in our observations.

I continue to wonder what truth is, and how best to observe it. It is a wonder that keeps me looking.

Creationism

There is a standing conflict between Creationists and the evidence for evolution.

The conflict Creationists have with evolution is that the evidence points to the random development of life, rather than pointing to the specific methodology of creation described in the Bible.

In other words, there is a contradiction between the opening chapter of the Bible and the evidence collected and observed about our own existence.

In one argument against the random development of life on Earth, a pastor put computer parts in a plastic bid on stage, shook it around for a minute, and noted that these computer parts did not become a functioning computer. Therefore, he concluded, there is no way that randomness led to the complexity of life as we know it.

However, a single bin with parts for a single computer being shaken for only one minute is in no way indicative of what the evidence suggests.

What if the bin was quite a bit larger, containing enough parts to make several trillion computers that, once created, could then reproduce in their likeness, and whose parts would not be damaged by all the colliding? What if that bin were shaken for several billion years? Is there really an argument that such an experiments would never, beyond a shadow of a doubt, yield at least one configuration of a fully functional computer?

Whenever observers watch species change over many generations, they are observing evidence of potentially predictable changes.

The observable evidence favoring a young-earth Creationist's perspective must be taken at the face value of the Bible that reports it. It is, let's say for the sake of argument, equivalent to an eye-witness testimony.

The observable evidence for evolution, however, is all around us, repeatable to this day, and confirmed by a number of sources committed to keeping one another accountable through determined skepticism. It is, let's say for the sake of argument, equivalent to multiple video recordings of the events.

My dilemma, though, is not whether there is sufficient evidence to believe in Creationism over evolution. My dilemma is whether the application of one theory over another results in a better understanding of what to expect when I interact with the world as it exists today.

In this case of the two competing theories, I have one that represents the potentially unpredictable behaviors of a deity, and another that is based on observable patterns that can be reproduced and can empower me to make predictions about how things in the world might behave in the future. So, the questions I find myself asking are these:

Is my well-being and the well-being of others helped or hindered by favoring one theory over the other?

Have the sciences and mathematics (including biology and statistics) developed and widely accepted over the last few millennia led mankind into an unpredictable dark age in which we are far worse off in understanding how the world behaves than we had been when we started?

Would it have been better if we committed ourselves to the explanations provided in the Bible, and never entertained the questions that led us to develop the sciences we have today, including biology and statistics?

Am I better off with theories like evolution, or adhering to doctrines like Creationism?