What Has Happened to Truth?

How do we prove something is true?  This has been a question of philosophy since the time of Aristotle.  The simple answer is that if something is true, it must be factual.  In other words, it must be able to be proven.  Since we accept values in mathematics, it is easy to prove that mathematical statements are true.  We all agree that 2+2=4, so that statement is true.  If I put water in a freezer that is less than 32 degrees, it will free, so we all accept that water freezes at 32 degrees F.  

Copernicus established the truth that the earth rotates around the sun, even though it took almost a hundred years for his theory to be accepted.  For science, truth must be empirical.  Einstein's theories of relativity have been proven to be true.  Truth for many is hard to accept, especially when it goes against firmly established beliefs, as Copernicus and Galileo discovered.  If truths that can be empirically proven are hard to accept, how do we deal with truths with no empirical evidence?

This brings us into the realm of religion.  Especially the truth of religious texts, in particular, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran.  These texts are full of miraculous occurrences.  We are in a time period now, April, that is significant to all three religions.  Ramadan and Easter have just occurred.  Passover begins in a week.  All of them involve miracles.  The Quran was revealed to Muhammed, Jesus rose from the dead, and the 10 plagues and the crossing of the Sea attest to this.

To believers, they are all true.  Accepted by all three faiths as the word of God, they are taken literally, even though they defy natural law.  A non-believer will say they could not happen, since nothing can break natural law.  This makes the texts a fiction.  A believer will accept that the omnipotence of God allows for miracles.  If God is capable of creating a universe who dimensions are beyond us, and if God is the author of the laws of physics, God is capable of manipulating them anyway God wants.  

My two favorite Jewish philosophers are Maimonides and Spinoza.  They both emphasize that for non empirically viable statements to be true, the interpretation and acceptance of the interpretations must be based on logic and rational.  Spinoza, like Aristotle, did not believe that God had a will, and would manipulate nature.  For Spinoza, God is nature and the laws of physics.  For him, God cannot perform miracles, because God does not perform.  God does not make the sun rise, God is the sun rise.  God cannot make the sun stand still, as Joshua 10 relates.  

Maimonides struggled with the conflict between his rationalist tendencies and his religious beliefs.  Unlike Aristotle and Spinoza, he was a theist.  He accepted Aristotle's contention that God was a perfect thought process, and so everything God does is true, logical, and rational.  If an interpretation does not measure up to logic, then the interpretation is wrong.  For him, when God wrote the laws of physics, there is a caveat that on one particular day, the laws can be emended.

As I stated in an earlier blog, the ancient Israelites thought with their hearts, their emotions,  The Greeks taught us that we think with our heads.  And so we struggle between them.  Our heart, our emotions, are not logical and rational.  They allow for religious belief.  Our heads tell us otherwise.  I see this conflict in Maimonides.  He tried to bring the two together.  We should temper our emotions with out intellect.  A true understanding of God is intellectual, not emotional.  Spinoza agreed with that.  For them, we must do all we can to develop our intellect, since that is where truth lies.

When I look at the world today, particularly the world of politics, I wonder what happened to truth.  Facts no longer matter.  In "Man of La Mancha", Don Quixote is being persuaded to give up his delusions because the facts negate them.  He responds, "facts are the enemies of truth".  It seems that should be the motto of our politicians.  They seem to make up any fact they want and pass them off as truths.  They are accepted by the masses as true because that is what they are told and they accept it blindly.  

Spinoza did not believe in free will.  For him, laws determine everything.  Physics determines how nature functions.  Geometry determines shapes.  Psychology determines human behavior.  The only freedom we have is the freedom to think.  We need to be educated to think logically and rationally.  Martin Luther translated the Bible into German so people would not be depended on the priests, but could study and learn on their own.  For Maimonides, thinking is the attribute that we share with God.  Education does not teach us to think.  Everyone thinks.  Education tries to teach us to think what is true.

I am afraid, though, that Bob Dylan may be correct, "there are no truths outside the gates of Eden,"