Discovering Truth

Truth exists because reality exists.

Consider a person who drives to town, goes into a coffee shop and says to his friends, “That’s quite a pothole north of town. I barely saw it, but I sure felt it!”

One of his friends replies, “I just came to town that same way. I didn’t see any pothole and I sure didn’t hit one. It was a smooth ride all the way for me.”

Did the pothole exist for one person and not for the other?

It’s hard to imagine anyone who would argue such a thing. More likely, there would be a discussion of whether one person imagined a pothole or the other person simply failed to see or hit it because of being on a slightly different track.

The more practical question is the extent to which we can actually know the truth, or to ask it somewhat differently, is our understanding of the truth true?

We process reality through our senses: sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing. If we had none of these senses, we would be absolutely cut off from the world around us, unaware of even our own existence. As long as we have at least one of them, however, and a functioning brain, we can process reality through the filter of our experience.

Our capacity to know the truth is shaped by our willingness to engage in critical thinking and by the way in which our experience has conditioned us.

In the same way, our capacity to be deceived is shaped by our unwillingness to engage in critical thinking and by the way in which our experience has conditioned us.

Discovering the truth about a pothole is relatively simple: we can go and see for ourselves, trusting our sense of sight and touch to confirm whether or not it is there. If you live in Michigan, you have lots of experience to guide you in this!

Discovering other truth is more complex. For instance, has Obamacare been a success or a disaster? Determining the truth of this would require a considerable amount of reliance on trusted sources. This raises a bigger question: who can you trust to be truthful?

Discovering religious truth is perhaps the most important – and the most complex – of all. There will be more said on this in later blogs after we have looked into the nature of critical thinking and the way in which experience conditions us.

Please note: any discussions on Obamacare resulting from this blog will be deleted. I will be interested in discussing it in the future, but not until much more groundwork has been laid and we can give it the attention a complicated matter deserves.