What is Truth and Can You Know It?

1. Read: 2 Timothy 3:1-7

2. Intro Illustration:

1) Fall of 1990, Introduction to Astronomy Class.

2) Professor started talking about the Copernican Revolution.

3) He said science was always revising itself and could never ultimately know anything.

4) I asked him whether science could know that the moon revolves around the earth.

5) He paused for a moment and then said, “no.” Science, he said, can only falsify theories; it cannot confirm them.

6) In the same breath he lauded Copernicus, he completely and totally undermined him.

7) The man was more committed to agnosticism than he was to truth.

3. About the Text:

1) 2 Timothy 3:7 says, “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

2) Agnosticism has been around for thousands of years.

3) The apostle Paul lived in a time of great learning.

4) He himself taught in the school of one Tyrannus for a period of two years (Acts 19:9).

5) There were many skeptics in his day and time.

6) Society is convinced that those who profess ignorance are better than those who don’t.

7) We’ve been persuaded to love the idea that one cannot know the truth.

8) In our society we are suffering from truth decay, and we need to fight it.

9) This state of affairs persists because our culture has given up on God.

4. Two tests for truth.

1) Concordance – Is the truth square with reality?

2) Consistency – Is the truth consistent with other truths?

5. Ref. to S, T, P, O, and A.

1. Christianity teaches that we can learn some things from science, i.e. by studying the natural world.

1) Consider Ecclesiastes 1:7 and the water cycle.

2) Christianity also teaches that such truths only make sense inside a theistic worldview where the ultimate purpose of such learning leads to God.

2. What if you claim science alone gives truth?

1) Bertrand Russell said, “Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know” (Religion and Science (1935), ch. IX: Science of Ethics).

2) This statement is self-defeating.

3. This reasoning is self defeating.

1) Francis Crick: “?‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

2) Charles Darwin said “With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

3) The problem is that if you give up on God, Christ, and the Bible, something else must become your basis for truth, and for science, it is just neurons!

4. Science was originally promoted by those who believed in God because they believed that the natural world was God’s work and the more we learned about it the more we learned about God.

1) Francis Bacon, the discoverer of the scientific method, wrote, “It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.” In Essays of Sir Francis Bacon, Of Atheism.

2) Isaac Newton: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. . . . This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God ???????????, or Universal Ruler . . . .”

3) “The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful – and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them.”? Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

5. With Theism and Christianity we can truly have scientific knowledge because we have an Ultimate Reality upon which to base that knowledge.

1) Science does well at concordance with reality.

2) Science fails the consistency test.

1. Christianity teaches that we can know some things based upon the self – “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified” (2 Corinthians 13:5).

1) Truth based upon self awareness – “I think, therefore, I am.”

2) Truth based upon reason – “If the dime is in the envelope . . . .”

3) Truth based upon individual personal experience in the world – “My toe hurts.”

2. If we use self alone as the standard, we end up with either solipsism or subjectivism.

1) Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” becomes proof only for myself alone.

2) Soren Kierkigaard – “Truth is subjectivity.”

3. Taking truth from the self alone ends in a divorce from reality.

1) Illustration: girl from existentialist class.

2) Three possibilities with knowledge.

a. I know all truth – obviously false.

b. I know some truth – true, but not comprehensive.

c. I know no truth – false because it would be a truth you know.

3) Ethical egoism. Atheist Kai Nielson said, “We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me… Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality” in “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984), p. 90.

4. With Christianity, we can have knowledge that comes from the self.

1) Defining knowledge by self alone fails at consistency.

2) It fails at concordance with reality too.

3) Jesus said, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31-32).

1. Christianity teaches that there is such a thing as truth based upon relationship.

1) “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:34-35).

2) “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God” (1 John 4:7).

2. When we reduce truth to society alone, it comes out as cultural relativism.

1) Richard Rorty says, “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”

2) Robert Fitch said, “Ours is an age where ethics has become obsolete. It is superceded by science, deleted by philosophy and dismissed as emotive by psychology. It is drowned in compassion, evaporates into aesthetics and retreats before relativism. The usual moral distinctions between good and bad are simply drowned in a maudlin emotion in which we feel more sympathy for the murderer than for the murdered, for the adulterer than for the betrayed, and in which we have actually begun to believe that the real guilty party, the one who somehow caused it all, is the victim, and not the perpetrator of the crime.” – Robert Fitch, “The Obsolescence of Ethics” in Christianity and Crisis: A Journal of Opinion, 1959.

3. Society begins with relationship, and relationships begin with human persons.

1) The foundation of society is to respect the individual value of other human persons.

2) Jesus gave us the two greatest commands for building society in Matthew 22:37-40 “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

4. With Christianity and society, we have the truths that flow from relationship, but with society alone, we fall into a hopeless quagmire of relativism.

1) Why truth? Ephesians 4:14-15 “That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:”

2) European Union Minister Rocco Buttiglione said, “Relativism should be confronted where it damages fundamental human rights, because we’re not relativists if we believe that the human being should be at the centre of society and the rights of every human being should be respected.”

3) Society fails at concordance and consistency.

1. Some say that truth is simply a social construct.

1) Truth is nothing more than a cultural phenomenon.

2) Words just exert power/influence on others to behave in a certain way.

2. Read John 18:33-38

1) Pilate asked the question, “What is truth?”

2) Two places this question is answered in John.

a. John 14:6 – “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

b. John 17:17 – “Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth” (ASV)

3. Scripture is God’s word.

1) John 17:17 – “Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth” (ASV)

2) 2 Timothy 3:16-17 – “All scripture is given by inspiration of God . . . .”

3) Titus 1:2 – God cannot lie.

4) Truth is reality put into propositions.

5) Who better to do this than the mind of God?

4. Can we put scripture to the test of concordance to reality?

1) Resurrection of Jesus is the single most significant event in scripture.

2) It passes the test of concordance because all that would need to be done is produce the body.

3) There is also archaeological evidence for the truths in the Bible.

4) Robert A. Emmons book The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns: “Religion or spirituality can provide a unifying philosophy of life and serve as an integrating and stabilizing force in the face of constant environmental and cultural pressures that push for fragmentation, particularly in postmodern cultures.”

5. Can we put scripture to the test of consistency?

1) There are many who have tried to find contradictions in the Bible.

2) These have all been explained as not truly contradictory in one way or another.

3) There are books that answer these alleged contradictions.

6. The Christian worldview says that we can have and know truth through revelation.

1. Our minds are built to reason and know truth.

1) A Chimpanzee cannot do what children do rationally.

2) Why can a pre-school child do what a Chimpanzee cannot?

3) Our minds are built to know truth.

4) Moreover, our minds are built to recognize and know God’s truth.

2. Christianity embraces not just one way of knowing truth, but several.

1) Science

2) Self

3) Society

4) Scripture

3. Invitation