Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, Part 1

Bulletin Roundtable

Bulletin Roundtable

The transcendentals are fundamental attributes of being that in much Christian thinking consist of truth, goodness, and beauty. In this Roundtable, broken into three parts, our three regular contributors each chose one of these to explain and explore. We begin with Paul Copan on truth.

Paul Copan

Truth

Only fear the Lord and serve Him in truth with all your heart; for consider what great things He has done for you. (1 Sam. 12:24)

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (Jn. 14:6)

…the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive. (Jn. 14:17)

Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. (Jn. 17:17)

Truth, goodness, and beauty are unified and cohere in the being of God, who is their source. And it is these transcendentals that are desirable in and of themselves; that is, our pursuit of them is self-justifying rather than being a means to some further end. For this month’s Roundtable, truth is the transcendental I’ll briefly discuss.

An Era of Truth Decay

We live in an era of truth decay. Many treat truth as a matter of preference, much like our approach to a buffet line: we pick out what we like and avoid what we don’t like. Our era that embraces skepticism, relativism, perspectivalism, and subjectivism keeps robust truth at arm’s length. Our ill-conceived brand of “tolerance”—“accepting all views as true”—is not only self-contradictory, but also self-destructive. As Dorothy Sayers put it,

In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair.  It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment.  It is the sin which believes nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.[1]

Postmodernism treats any metanarrative—such as the gospel story of the triune God, creation, fall, redemption, and re-creation—with suspicion. Yet postmodernism presents its own metanarrative, albeit a fragmented one, that assumes the truthfulness of its own perspective or stance; the postmodern takes her own position as the more virtuous one, and where one would disagree, then at the point the detractor would be in error. Despite the so-called “tolerance” of our era, we find that much of our culture is governed by the “dictatorship of relativism,” as Pope John Paul II noted.

With this as a backdrop, let’s briefly look at truth theologically, philosophically, and culturally.

Theology: Truth and the Triune God

Theologically speaking, truth is anchored in the triune self-subsisting God, whose truth—along with goodness and beauty—is underived from any external source. God is the ultimate reality, on which all contingent reality depends (Ac. 17:28).

In John 14-17, we read that the Father’s “word is truth”; that Jesus is “the truth” who faithfully reveals God’s character; and that “the Spirit of truth” has come as “another Helper” in Jesus’ stead. Jesus also calls himself “the true vine” (Jn. 15:1). That is, he is genuine or authentic and faithful—unlike the “vine” of faithless, fruitless national Israel (Isa. 5:1-7; cf. Ps. 80:8, 14). John 15 presents a contrast for Jesus’ disciples as the new Israel (Rom. 2:28-29; Phil. 3:3): In an asymmetrical abiding, the disciples of Jesus—the branches—are dependent upon (“abide in”) Jesus, while he sustains (“abides in”) them, resulting in bringing forth the authentic fruit of love.

This production of true fruit comes through depending on the true or genuine vine—without whom we can do nothing. The beauty and goodness of this “abiding” life reflects a life anchored in reality. So no wonder 1 John connects this state of abiding to life-giving truth—as opposed to life-draining falsehoods and heresies: “As for you, the anointing which you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you; but as His anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you abide in Him” (1 Jn. 2:27).

Since Christ is the source of all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3) and since he holds all things together (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3), truth can’t be reduced to mere doctrinal content—factual knowledge of theological truths, which demons also recognize (Jas. 2:19). Personal—in fact, filial knowledge—of God is the heart of eternal life (Jn. 17:3). This personal knowledge increasingly sets us free from the reality-distorting powers of sin and Satan and damaging God-substitutes (Jn. 8:32, 44; 1 Jn. 5:21).

Now, being attached to the genuine or authentic God doesn’t shield us from reality; this relationship reflects a fundamental vision of reality.[2] Personal knowledge of the triune God is to be connected to the root of reality—to Reality itself.

Philosophy: Truth and Reality

Defining Truth: Warranted vs. Justified True Belief

Philosophically speaking, the nature of truth continues to be the subject of ongoing debate. How do we define truth? What makes something true? The sophist Protagoras (born ca. 500 BC) maintained that the human community is the standard of truth. Plato cited him as saying that “man is the measure of all things” and, accordingly, any given thing “is to me such as it appears to me, and is to you such as it appears to you.”[3] This sounds a lot like the common relativistic mantra, “That’s true for you, but not for me.”[4]

In his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral [or Extra-Moral] Sense” (1873), Friedrich Nietzsche gave this definition of “truth”:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.[5]

More recently, the late Richard Rorty claimed: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.” 

These questionable accounts of truth are pernicious because they ultimately undermine the possibility of genuine knowledge. Truth is important for us because it makes knowledge possible. That is, we can’t know something unless it is true. I can’t rightly say, “I know that Major League Baseball games have a length of seven innings.” While I can know that a statement or a belief is false (I know it’s false that the earth is flat), I can’t know falsehood.

More needs to be said here. One can hold to a true belief but still not have knowledge. It could be an accidentally-true belief. For example, I look at a non-working clock in a store window and conclude that, say, 12:40 is the correct time. As it turns out, the clock coincidentally happens show what the time actually is—12:40! But my true belief would be unwarranted and cannot qualify as knowledge. The basis for my true belief cannot be a non-working clock.

In several dialogues (Phaedo, Meno, and Theaetetus), Plato discusses what knowledge is. he laid the groundwork for a commonly accepted tri-partite definition of knowledge: it is (a) a belief that is (b) true and also (c) justified. That is, a reason or an account (logos) is required to turn true belief into knowledge. However, defining knowledge as “justified true belief” (JTB) can get a bit murky. For one thing, what do we mean by “justified”? After all, a person in a padded cell may (defectively) believe he is Napoleon Bonaparte, and, as Alvin Plantinga says, he may be justified—having done his utmost—in excelsis in believing this. One may be “justified” in believing something but remain very much in error. Following Alvin Plantinga, I would argue for something stronger than justification (epistemically doing one’s best).[6] Warrant, which presupposes proper cognitive function, which is necessary for knowledge.[7]

Truth as Correspondence

Is “truth” to be understood as “correspondence” (a belief or proposition matching with reality), “coherence” (beliefs that fit together), “pragmatism” (beliefs that work)—or perhaps along the lines of a “deflationary” account (truth is not a property of assertions)?

I would argue that the inescapable understanding of truth is that of correspondence: a belief, story, proposition, or statement is true if it matches up with—or corresponds to—reality. Reality is the “truth-maker.” Reality renders a statement or story true or false. If I assert that the moon is made of cheese, this would be false because my statement doesn’t match up with or correspond to reality. Ultimately, any theory of truth will default to the correspondence version of truth.

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle defended this view of truth, defining it this way: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (Metaph. 1011b). Truth is anchored in being (reality) and falsehood in not being. Truth depends on a thing (reality) and not vice versa. When a subject and predicate are properly combined (e.g., “Socrates is Greek”), they affirm what is true. When wrongly combined (e.g., “Socrates is not Greek”), they are false. This gets at what we standardly and intuitively mean by “truth.”

Culture: Undermining vs. Affirming the Truth

Culturally speaking, we have noted how truth has come under fire, not only in light of relativism and subjectivism but the encroachments of naturalism.  Given a materialistic metaphysic and a deterministic view of causality, rationality is further undermined by the assumptions undergirding naturalistic evolution. Let’s look at a few examples.

The linguist Noam Chomsky claims that it’s “just blind luck”—a “lucky accident”—that our beliefs happen to be true (i.e., conforming more or less to the way the world actually works).[8] Likewise, Richard Rorty insisted that naturalism requires that “every sound or inscription which will ever be uttered” by humans is utterly predictable based on the physical micro-processes at work within them.[9] And the philosopher Patricia Churchland puts it this way:

Boiled down to its essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chance for survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost. [10]

This would mean that Chomsky’s, Rorty’s, and Churchland’s assertions of these truths are “just blind luck” and the deterministic result of mere physical processes rather than the workings of properly functioning rational minds aimed at the truth. They don’t qualify as knowledge. Yet these naturalists seem convinced that they know their view is true.

Though we live in an era of truth-avoidance, to deny the truth is to affirm it. To say there is no truth is to assume that “it’s true that there is no truth.” And to insist that knowledge is impossible is to make a knowledge claim. Furthermore, to claim that truth is all a matter of perspective is claiming something either self-contradictory or trivial: if the detractor disagrees that truth is just a matter of perspective, then she is in error (self-contradictory), or, if you take your perspective to be nothing more than perspective or opinion, no one needs to take this with any seriousness (trivial). Those who would insist that they are only “giving their opinion” typically don’t believe their view is mere opinion, but rather a statement of knowledge. When people who disagree with Christians—or other truth-asserters—by saying, “That’s just your opinion,” we can ask, “Then why should you prefer your own opinion unless you take it to be true and thus a claim to knowledge.” This could, in turn, allow for an opportunity to explore the reasons for such a claim to knowledge.

Conclusion

If the gospel story is true—if Jesus was raised from the dead as a fact of history—then Christians are warranted in making authoritative knowledge claims about this. The reality of the gospel also demands a personal, intellectual, and volitional response. Indeed, the truth of the gospel prompted Paul to tell the Athenians that God, who is not far from each one of us (Ac. 17:37), commands all people everywhere to repent (v. 30).

Truth is rooted in the triune God, and the truth, embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, ought to reshape our vision and reorient our lives. As the late historical theologian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote, “If Christ is risen, then nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen, then nothing else matters.”[11]

Notes

[1] Dorothy Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 152.

[2] Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness (New York: HarperOne, 2015), 81.

[3] Theaetetus 152a. Taken from Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Roger Trigg points out that Protagoras's position could more technically be considered a subjectivistic one rather than a relativistic one because Protagoras is “thinking in terms of each individual rather than of societies” (Reason and Commitment [Cambridge: University Press, 1973], 3).

[4] My book True for You, But Not for Me examines a number of this and other common relativistic and pluralistic slogans of our time (2nd edition, Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2009).

[5] For a brief overview of Nietzsche’s essay and its interpretations, see Stephen Glib’s comments: https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/on-truth-and-lies-in-an-extra-moral-sense/.

[6] Alvin Plantinga, “Warrant and Accidentally True Belief,” Analysis 57 (April 1997): 142.

[7] I won’t address the “Gettier problem,” which shows that some justified true beliefs don’t actually count as knowledge.

[8] Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 157–58.

[9] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 387.

[10] Patricia Churchland, “Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience,” Journal of Philosophy 84 (October 1987): 5489.  

[11] Quoted in Martin E. Marty, “Professor Pelikan,” Christian Century 123 (June 13, 2006): 47.

— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.

Image by James Wheeler from Pixabay

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