The Meaning of Truth
My last blog entry seemed to have transpired a light year ago. This inactivity is attributed to my full time school and full time job. I have a lighter work load this spring. My thursday night class was cancelled due to the lack of students (damn you! Grey's Anatomy!), and I don't plan on adding another class.
I felt obliged to write this blog because questions about the meaning of truth have surfaced in many of my classes and private conversations. What is the definition of truth? What do you mean objective truth is unattainable? It is nearly impossible to provide a satisfactory explanation in a class room setting because, quite frankly, I believe that a philosophical system which can be fully explained in two minutes is no use for human intellect. Obvious there is not enough time for a long discourse in this matter during a class. However, I really do need to find a quick and dirty way to explain this. It is good for me now to practice articulating my ideas about this very subject. I am sure another discussion about the concept of truth will emerge again in the very near future. With luck, I'll might even get some feedbacks from one or two of you who actually read my blogs.
The simplest way I can define truth is this: truth is a proposition which is logically coherent within a given set of other propositions. This implies that an absolute truth is logically coherent with absolutely everything including phenomenon that are completely beyond our senses. This definition sounds really bizaare and intellectually unsatisfying, but I don't think there are other definitions that work. Just hang on a little bit.
A common sense definition is that truth is what the Reality is. There are two difficulties with that definition. First of all, we really have to prove that there really is something out there. Second of all, that definition is completely useless. From the human perspective, the reality can always be logically defined as a set of known's and unknown's. How can we attest that the truth that we obtained can correspond perfectly with the unknown portion of the reality? This is the problem with science right now. At first we thought Newton's laws perfectly represents the reality, but physicists found out that they are merely approximations. At our present state of science it has been said that if our ignorance is the sea, our knowledge is merely a drop of water. We are not anywhere close to attainment of omniscience of the universe.
Sadly, the definition I proposed rendered truth a relative property. The implication is that genuine knowledge is not grounded on the Absolute but rather grounded on logical coherence. Thusly it is paramount that we expand our body of knowledge as large as we possibly can. Because in order to establish genuine knowledge, we not only have to test it against our observations but also against other bodies of knowledge. Therefore, the larger our body of knowledge is, the more accurate the model of reality is.
Everything I have touched on so far can be applied to biblical exegesis. A "True" interpretation is the one which is coherent with the reality. Unfortunately we have neither the access to the authors nor the non-known portion of the reality which I spoke off. There are just so many things in the biblical worlds which we don't know about.
I felt obliged to write this blog because questions about the meaning of truth have surfaced in many of my classes and private conversations. What is the definition of truth? What do you mean objective truth is unattainable? It is nearly impossible to provide a satisfactory explanation in a class room setting because, quite frankly, I believe that a philosophical system which can be fully explained in two minutes is no use for human intellect. Obvious there is not enough time for a long discourse in this matter during a class. However, I really do need to find a quick and dirty way to explain this. It is good for me now to practice articulating my ideas about this very subject. I am sure another discussion about the concept of truth will emerge again in the very near future. With luck, I'll might even get some feedbacks from one or two of you who actually read my blogs.
The simplest way I can define truth is this: truth is a proposition which is logically coherent within a given set of other propositions. This implies that an absolute truth is logically coherent with absolutely everything including phenomenon that are completely beyond our senses. This definition sounds really bizaare and intellectually unsatisfying, but I don't think there are other definitions that work. Just hang on a little bit.
A common sense definition is that truth is what the Reality is. There are two difficulties with that definition. First of all, we really have to prove that there really is something out there. Second of all, that definition is completely useless. From the human perspective, the reality can always be logically defined as a set of known's and unknown's. How can we attest that the truth that we obtained can correspond perfectly with the unknown portion of the reality? This is the problem with science right now. At first we thought Newton's laws perfectly represents the reality, but physicists found out that they are merely approximations. At our present state of science it has been said that if our ignorance is the sea, our knowledge is merely a drop of water. We are not anywhere close to attainment of omniscience of the universe.
Sadly, the definition I proposed rendered truth a relative property. The implication is that genuine knowledge is not grounded on the Absolute but rather grounded on logical coherence. Thusly it is paramount that we expand our body of knowledge as large as we possibly can. Because in order to establish genuine knowledge, we not only have to test it against our observations but also against other bodies of knowledge. Therefore, the larger our body of knowledge is, the more accurate the model of reality is.
Everything I have touched on so far can be applied to biblical exegesis. A "True" interpretation is the one which is coherent with the reality. Unfortunately we have neither the access to the authors nor the non-known portion of the reality which I spoke off. There are just so many things in the biblical worlds which we don't know about.
posted by doulos theou | 2:29 AM
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