Rejoice in the Truth

The truth has had a bad press of late. Postmodern relativists have had a field day in reinventing the concept of truth as a fiction, a working hypothesis, a best guess, a rhetorical pat on the back or just what you can get away with saying. They say that truth is merely a social construction. I subscribe to the old fashioned view that something really is the case and that there is an unlimited supply of possible propositions that are not the case. I concede that the word relativism has been used in connection with some great thinkers and some sensible ideas, for example in literature recognising that there is no one true meaning of a given text, but outside the rarefied domain of literary theorists, what is really true is paramount. Not everyone’s opinion is equally worth listening to. It is no use saying that a belief is true for the person believing it - true for you. When the judge sends down the man convicted of murder the whole court proceedings are premised on the idea of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, something to be sought and acted upon. We don’t say that the judge and jury have merely expressed their own personal opinion. In practice we don’t act as if this truth is merely provisional. There is a growing army of believers in magic, superstition, new age healing, homeopathy, creationism, intelligent design, holocaust denial, biblical literalism, climate change denial, miracles, ghosts, UFOs, pyramid power, virgin birth and the list could go on and on. I would suggest that we stop acting on the assumption that these ideas are merely provisional untruths. The fact that conservative Christians set themselves up as guardians against the excesses of relativism is an irony. If there really is a “real” God in the sense that religious people believe there to be, then I will have wasted my life in the worst possible way in spending my time promoting Humanism. Donald Rumsfeld famously said “There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are also unknown unknowns”. All true but that we don’t always know whether a given belief is true or not does not put that belief in some logical limbo between truth and falsehood. It’s true or false independent of us and truth matters.