“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Arthur Conan Doyle
The truth has always been a battleground from which very few (if any at all) can claim absolute victory. Philosophers and freethinkers that pre-date Socrates have grappled with how to decode life’s mysteries into one agreeable coherent understanding, but so far, everyone is just giving it their best guess.
There are those who think that, for a belief to be true, it must correspond to the actual state of affairs in the external world. But can what is true be defined purely on the merit of how well it describes/copies “reality”?
Does a camera really never lie? Is seeing believing? Do we even share the same reality? Thirteenth century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas thought so; he was a great believer that the truth was something we could all externally agree upon, saying “a judgement is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality.”
But Aquinas was writing in the days when only the Catholic Church could claim their opinions to be the absolute truth, a fact that many Lutheran’s of the time contested with their lives (a truly dark age).
Thankfully times change, and truth follows (or vice versa)…but it rarely happens everywhere at once.
Still today, when giving testimony in some (most) courts in the west, you are asked to tell the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth while swearing on the Bible and asking for gods help. Which is bizarre, considering that the Bible is crammed with staggeringly inaccurate propositions, such as the world being created in six days.
And as modern philosophers Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy proposed in their brilliant book The Laughing Jesus, “what if the old testament was a work of fiction? What if Jesus never existed? What if the Bible is a political work of propaganda created by Taliban-like fundamentalists to justify the sort of religious violence we are witnessing in the world today?”
What if indeed…
In the days of Aquinas such inquiries would have had you burned at the stake (in some parts of the world, the same fate could await Freke today), but we can take nothing for granted if we want to discover the truth. According to Freke: “None of the stories we tell to help us navigate towards the truth are the truth, but some come closer to being true stories than others…most of us are so wrapped up in our stories that we mistake them for certain knowledge. We treat our stories, which are at best relatively true, as the absolute truth.”
This cannot be more truly stated than for some in the scientific community. Just as the Catholic priests of their day claimed their knowledge to be the only truth, our priests in lab coats have transformed the test tube into the scepter to guide us into the new ages.
If something is stated as “scientifically proven”, we must bow down to it as if not to do so would transform us into an irrational heretic. Yet how much of science is absolute? Even Einstein remarked: “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
All the greatest minds in the world, the greatest thinkers, artists and scientists of our time have all had one thing in common: they were absolutely unprepared to accept the truth as other people perceived it. Nothing would progress if everyone simply accepted the status quo.
The world would still be flat.
Certainly one thing going for science is the language of mathematics. A mathematician in Iraq and a physicist in Wales may be brought up in two very different cultures, but the principles of mathematics are the same for both of them. There is something very beautiful about this. Because it seems that whatever the truth is, nothing serves as a greater barrier to it than language. There are now close to 7 billion people inhabiting Earth, speaking 6’809 different languages (most of them are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people)
According to Wikipedia: “All languages have words that are not easily translatable into another. The German word Zeitgeist is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word apparently fails to accurately capture its full meaning.”
What truth we create we do so in our own reality, but nothing is certain, you can never know everything, and nothing can really prepare you for what you can find out: gnosis is limitless. If we cannot agree on any other thing, perhaps this is a good place to start.
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