Truth 101 - some thoughts

Huge subject - but some reading and thinking lately has brought a little clarity to my understanding of the current post-modern view of truth and also some of the serious objections to it.

The current secular view is that there is no such thing as absolute truth and that all truth is relative and subjective. "This is my truth, tell me yours" as the Manic Street Preachers said. We are told therefore that we must never impose our personal view of truth on others. Neither can we claim that our view of truth (or for that matter any view of truth) is the only one. Christianity is frequently a target for this kind of argument.

It seems that the guy who contributed most to this post-modern view of truth is the Frenchman Michel Foucault, a philosopher who followed in the line of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who was famed for his "God is dead." statement. Foucault says that "Truth is a thing of this world. It is produced only by multiple forms of constraint and that includes the multiple effects of power." In other words one person's claim to have truth is a means to gaining power over others or restricting their freedom in some way.

As I understand it Nietzsche was famous for being suspicious of everything but in particular the motives for actions based on moral belief or "truth". To cite a modern example - why should the US think it has a moral right to enforce a democratic system like it's own on other nations of the world? To claim that the US democratic system is somehow the best model in all circumstances is a truth claim that to many people is obviously flawed and to make that claim inevitably leads to suspicion about the motive behind that belief. Ultimately this looks like a power play, a means of exercising control over others.

But that example is on a large scale. On an individual scale my desire to convince someone else of the truth of my beliefs would be subjected to the suspicion that I was doing so in order to gain some power over over them or to limit them in some way or even just to justify myself. Now there is a sense in which this suspicion is justified. After all Jesus levelled this argument at the Pharisees of his day. This party had good beginnings, they stood against the influence of the Greek conquerors and their pantheism and way of life in order to maintain the purity of their religion and God-given law. But by the time of Jesus they had become the rigid, holier-than-thou party that we meet in the gospels, always claiming the moral high ground. But they were also known for imposing their views on others but Jesus saw through their proselytising and exposed it for what it was - a power play to gain control over others and to justify their own world view - and even get power over God.

I suppose that from this suspicious viewpoint grew Nietzsche's hatred of all religious systems (particularly Christianity whose emphasis on humility and dependence on grace he saw as promoting weakness and whose hierarchy he saw as the ultimate power-players) and many others have followed in his footsteps. Currently secular thought is  dominated by Foucault's view that no belief system can be trusted, that no claim to absolute universal truth can stand.

But if the claims of these men were true then we have lost all our ground for battling injustice, intolerance and oppression. In fact we have no basis for making any moral statement whatsoever. It seems that G.K. Chesterton was right when he pointed out that "The new rebel is a sceptic and will not trust anything and therefore can never be a revolutionary. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind.... by rebelling against everything he has lost the right to rebel against anything."

At any rate isn't it the case that if Nietzsche and Foucault etc. are right shouldn't we treat their view of reality with equal suspicion? Why should we subscribe to their view of truth? Why should we put our faith in their relativistic world view. After all we exhibit faith in what we believe to be true every moment of our lives.

The same argument applies to the evolutionary biologists who claim that all thought is purely the result of the reactions of one chemical with another in the brain and that what used to be regarded as universal self evident morality is a mirage. Well the same argument applies to their claims to truth. Why should we listen to their explanations if all they have to say is the product of random chemical reactions in their brains?

In fact to claim that there is no such thing as absolute truth is in itself a truth claim and one which could be seen as the ultimate truth claim - in the sense that it seeks to impose its constraints on everyone it seeks to gain power over. So why should we believe it?

In any case it seems to me that though we may stick to the view that all truth is relative, we certainly don't live as if that's true and it may be the case that we could say that we can't live as if that's true. Men have tried to live as amoral beings, shunning all obligation to any kind of right or wrong and have ended as lunatics or in guilt-ridden despair. We continue to battle for justice, for human rights, against oppression and what we generalise as "inhuman behaviour". From whence does the moral standard of acceptable human behaviour come if there is no such thing as absolute truth we might well ask?


There have been plenty of claims to absolute, universal truth over the centuries and in many cases it hasn't required a great deal of effort to see through them. So what makes Jesus claim to the truth so different. Well for one thing He actually claimed to be the truth, "I am the way, the truth and the life." Thomas Aquinas commented, "Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without the life there is no living." What a claim this is! To be the embodiment of absolute truth!

And in opposition to the philosophies of Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and most modern secular thought which say that all truth claims lead are power plays which lead to constraint and loss of freedom, Jesus claimed that while that may be true for many truth claims, perhaps even for the majority of truth claims, understanding the truth that is Jesus Himself will not constrain us but set us free. Wow, this is a claim worthy of further thought and investigation.  Flash