It seems that I've been dwelling on this topic for months now, after having gone through several recent personal experiences that have left me dazed and confused. It seems that there is no time better than the present to solve a puzzle I thought I solved so many years ago. Life seems to have unanswered this riddle in a way that I have never experienced. I can't think of a more important subject than this one of defining the truth.

In our unplugged group, we have had several discussions about the nature of truth, the place of perspective and opinion, and the validity of facts. It quickly became apparent that much of the truth we take for granted isn't truth at all. We know that by the standard definition of truth. But, the definition doesn't really seem to help us identify it when we see it. It's so much easier to know when something is NOT true than determining whether something IS true.

I think it has to do with laziness. I have observed that most people have the tendency to oversimplify things in order to be done with them, especially if the subject matter is not very important to them. Questions about God are not especially important to someone obsessed with money. Financial principles are not very important for a Buddhist monk. People come up with enlightened "wise sayings" that seem to say it all in just a few words. But, I have learned that not all things that make sense are necessarily or completely true.

So, what is truth? The simple English definition of the word is that it is "the true or actual state of a matter." That seems easy enough, until you have to evaluate the statement. How does one confirm the true or actual state of a matter? To resolve even the simplest truth, there are limitless questions that must be answered. For example, let's evaluate the statement:

John is sitting on a stool.

When we try to evaluate this statement, we must first ask ourselves:

1. Is this John?


2. If so, is he sitting?


3. If so, is what he is sitting on a stool?


4. Are we sure? What is a stool?

This seems simple enough. Until we realize that each question creates new questions. Let's follow track #1:

1. Who is John?


2. What is John?


3. Where is John currently?


4. What is John's posture?


5. How do we know this is John?


6. Can we confirm his identity?


7. Can we confirm the evidence?


8. Are we awake or dreaming?

.and these are just a few of the many questions we can ask in order to evaluate question #1. However, this is not as significant as what I am excited to have discovered. However limitless the amount of questions you must answer, when you call the statement 'John is sitting on a stool' truth, you are in fact claiming that every answer to every possible question regarding this statement is truth as well. Truth is therefore comprised of other truths, which are made up of individual nuggets of fact. In other words, truth is not the most basic building block, but an evaluation of something. It is a conclusion we come to after feeling sure that all relevant answers to any questions remotely tied to a statement, belief, or status will authenticate it in a way that is absolute.

Now, there are few things in life we have evaluated that thoroughly! For those of us willing to admit we don't know everything, we can remember a time when our views were very different than they are now. Yet, we always believe that our current perspective is correct. How can that be? Does truth itself change? I don't think so. I think that it is the action of living that eventually brings out the questions we never asked ourselves and forces us to answer the question at different times from different vantage points. The moment the answers to our evaluations change, so does our view of truth. We either confirm our suspicions, become distressed by the contradictions between our understanding and the new information we discover, or we embrace the change and evolve our understanding.

But, if it changes, then how can it be truth? This brings us to a real eye-opener. Most of us don't live in absolute truth. We make decisions based on assumptions. We don't test to see if the sky is going to fall before going outside - we take for granted that everything will stay where it has always been. We state that time has gone by when time itself is actually a very volatile idea. We state who we "are" instead of acknowledging that we are who we "became" - which we completely invented! We do this because it is easier to wrap your head around a large concept than delve into the thousands of details that construct our understanding of the truth.

Whether John is sitting on a stool or not really doesn't matter. But, determining whether God is real, or whether your marriage is real, or whether your LIFE is real does matter. If truth is a container of other truths comprised of individual facts, the key to everything is in the breakdown - in the spaces that fill our truths, where so much room exists for exaggeration and lies. Once that happens, the battle for the truth is lost and the rest of the batch is spoiled.

Jesus put a lot of pressure on the church when He associated the truth with His followers. I can think of so many occasions when the church has not been so "truth-full". I believe we are in the middle of one of history's biggest quests for truth. With so much data readily available, unformed opinions are almost inexcusable. But, along with information we must also wade through an unprecedented amount of disinformation. This challenges us beyond our ADHD attention span, pushing us towards almost scientific levels of evaluation.

In the middle of all of this, where is the truth that sets us free? How do we find it? How do we know it when we see it? How do we represent it? Finally, how do we use it to help this world and to accomplish the will of God in our lives? We'll explore that in my next post, but I welcome your commentary below.