The Nagging Question: “What Is Truth?”

The question comes almost every day to antagonize me.  It nags at me.  It is the same question Pontius Pilate put to Jesus:  “What is truth?”  Pilate’s question was in response to Jesus’ saying that He was a “witness to the truth,” but Pilate didn’t really get an answer, and he didn’t even wait for an answer.  He just simply washed his hands of the dilemma he faced and told the crowd to act on what they thought was true.  And they did.  They crucified Jesus.

In Plato’s Protagoras, Protagoras says to Socrates something to this effect:  What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me.  That seems to be where we still are after all the centuries that have passed by since Plato.  It is the notion that truth is always personal and relative.  This notion is pervasive in our political life these days.  

There is a truth in Protagoras’ statement—there is such a thing as relative and subjective truth.  Someone explained it like this:  If you are wearing a coat on a very cold day, and I’m not, I might say to you “It is really cold out here.” You, on the other hand, wearing your warm coat might respond by saying, “No, it’s not cold to me.”  Both statements are true.  It is cold for me without a coat.  It isn’t cold for you because you are wearing a coat. Truth in this situation is both relative and subjective.  

What about objective truth?  Is there no truth other than that which is subjective—my truth and your truth—Mr. Trump’s truth and Andrew McCabe’s truth?  

The idea that all truth is subjective, that there is no objective truth, is a myth.  Science, philosophy and logic confirm this.   But how do I get to it?  I get to it by confirmable evidence and empirical fact, believing that there is truth outside our individual biases, perspectives, interpretations, feelings, imaginings, and/or opinions. 

To live with the nagging question is to continually search for the facts and evidence available to us and then move toward the truth.  To live with only what is true for you and what is true for me, if it hasn’t already, will produce chaos.

The Library of ancient Ephesus