17 September 2009

What Is Truth?

Is truth even something that can be qualified? I'm not sure. Now, I'm not talking about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I am talking about life in the general sense.
Seriously, how do you KNOW what is truth? You can't take a single person's telling of "the truth" to be such as it is already tainted and twisted from their unique perspective. You can't take it from a mass of people as there will unfailingly be too many different situations within an occurrence to know what, again, was said and done and for what purpose. I know we have a system of law to defend the truth, but we all know that system if flawed.
So, again, how can you know truth in any given situation? You can't. You just have to trust pieces of the truth to exist and let that be enough. Hmmm...perhaps that is why we are told "judge not lest ye be judged." Kinda sucks for someone who wants to know the truth.

2 comments:

Ryan said...

Philosophers, Logicians and Mathematicians have argued about this forever. According to Gödel's incompleteness proofs of mathematics, truth outruns the ability to be proven within its own system. It is similar to saying that you can't really define what a word means in English when you are speaking English to define it. You have to use some other language to look down on the system and describe/define it, otherwise you run into a circular problem. So by analogy, one cannot find truth without relying on some other (be it higher) system of learning.

As a side note, the philosophers discount Gödel's proofs as being only limited to systems of mathematics, and to some degree they are right... but I think it provides a good analogy for other systems as well.

Joni said...

So postmodern:) Seriously, we talked about this all the time in my history classes. We concluded that there was an absolute truth but no one knew it (other than God, of course).