Quid Est Veritas?

    I have been doing a lot of studying of late on the topics of truth, reality, God, and my faith. During this search for a deeper understanding of all of these topics, I have often reflected on the name of my blog, “Real Truth or Bust.” Truth having – at least in my intentions – a prominent place in each of my posts, I’ve decided that it would be prudent for me to write a post about it, that is, truth itself. I do this mostly for the collection of my own thoughts, but also in the hopes that others will learn from the things that I have absorbed throughout the beginnings of this venture.

    The first thing that one may wonder when asking this question is, why is the truth important? Why should I care? Knowing that a majority of my audience (if not all of it) is made up of Christians and Catholics, I will simply ask you to recall the Latin phrase that I have chosen for the title of this post, “Quid est veritas” (What is truth?). Pontius Pilate incredulously asked Jesus this after Jesus told him the reason for His coming to earth, “For this reason I was born and have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to My voice” (John 18:37). While these words should be enough to get most Christians interested, I would also like to add that unless one knows what the Truth is, they will never really know anything. Without a proper understanding of what truth is, one can only hope in what they think they know, which is not knowing, it’s simply believing.

    When posed with the question, “what is Truth?”, the first answer that any well raised Catholic will procure is the cop-out answer, “God is Truth.” This answer is unhelpful for three reasons: One, it is a lazy response and does not attempt to answer the question nor give any valuable insight without first gaining a far greater understanding of truth. Two, it simply begs the follow up question “what is God” (good luck answering that one) and gives the impression that the Truth is like God in the sense that it is difficult, no, impossible, to completely understand, much less define, in this world. Three, and perhaps most importantly, it is not a definition of Truth, but rather a fact that that is made manifest from the definition of truth. This final reason can only be understood by actually gaining insight into what Truth actually is.

    The modern understanding of truth seems to be a little bit vague, even amongst Catholic circles. This is made evident by the question I posed above and the likely go to response of anyone who has the Catholic understanding of this world. We know that truth is very important. We know many truths about things, this world, and ourselves. However, when posed with this very simple question, “Quid est veritas,” a majority of us reduce our definitions to metaphors that may or may not touch upon the actual definition.

    Often, when our “God is Truth” answer does not sate the thirst for knowledge that initially led to the question being asked, we will be forced to respond with something that *is* true (a.k.a an example and not a definition). Math, being something that we all believe to be a very foundational principle and widely accepted “truth” of our time, is often the fall back. “One plus one equals two,” we reply, “That’s true.” This answer, while nowhere near a definition for truth, oftentimes creates a conundrum for the inquirer.

    The inquirer is backed into a corner with three options. One, accept that “one plus one equals two” is a truth, and admit there is actually truth. Two, deny that “one plus one equals two” is actually true and call into question all of our modern science (not to mention the reason for the existence of the phone that is relentlessly buzzing in their pockets). Or three, throw up their hands and just say, “well, there could just not be truth, and you can’t prove there is.” Since the first two options necessarily oppose the viewpoints of most people, the inquirer will simply opt for the third, and since the “inquire-e” does not actually know the definition of truth, he can only flounder around with this argument until eventually both parties must acknowledge they are at an impasse.

    Therefore, we must take a step back and approach this from the ground up. Instead of attempting to impose a definition of truth based on things we already know about it, we need to re-discover truth from basic principles. How do we do this? For a moment, we cast aside what we think we know about truth and start over again. We reignite in our hearts with that fire that we once had when we were young to understand things, to know, that inquisitiveness that lead us to put everything in our mouths despite the best efforts of our parents, that relentless questioning that used to drive our parents mad. Then, we begin to inspect the things we can see around us. We use our senses, even as we did as children.

    The difficult thing with truth is, well, it’s a very general thing. We all intuitively can see that many things are true, and many things are not, but this intuition is so ingrained in us at this point in our lives that we’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always that simple. At one point in time, we didn’t know what truth was. Fortunately, this is good news for us, it means that we can actually re-discover truth, we just have to re-track our steps.

    As a child, we would have first begun to understand truth from our parents. Perhaps, when learning our colors, we would say that firetrucks are blue, to which our parents would respond, “No, firetrucks are red.” After some convincing, and maybe a few examples of other things that are red, we eventually would be shown by our parents that firetrucks are, in fact, red and not blue. Unwittingly, we have actually learned a little about truth here. Our younger self believed that firetrucks were blue, but this was not true, and it was only through the use of our senses, our sight, that we were able to understand and be convinced by our parents of that error.

    This leads us to the more important question: why is it not true that firetrucks are blue? The obvious answer is: firetrucks are not blue, they are red. It is not true that firetrucks are blue, because a firetruck is red. We can all see that. This leads us to a very vague understanding of truth because it shows us something very important: truth and reality are very similar things. Whether something is true or not is dependent on the existence of the thing. This may lead us to a tentative definition for truth: truth is something that is (i.e. anything that is, is also true, it is real, it is a part of reality).

    Unfortunately, this definition doesn’t quite fit the bill. Even though it does seem to work in most cases, the definition leaves out a key component truth: the person. Everything around us exists, the words that we use all exist in a limited sense, and yet, not all of the things that we say are true. Thus, truth must also have something to do with us. So, let’s go back to the firetruck example before.

    The firetruck does exist, the redness of the firetruck exists, but our younger selves believed the firetruck to be blue. The problem was not that the firetruck did not exist, or that the color blue didn’t exist, the problem was that the child believed the firetruck to be blue, when in reality it was actually red. Thus, we arrive at proper definition of truth: truth is conformity of the mind with reality.

    At first glance, this may appear to be relativistic. After all, we’re saying that truth actually is dependent on the mind of the individual. However, remember, the definition is “conformity of the mind with reality,” and not “conformity of reality with the mind”. Thus, we are not saying that the measure of truth is in the mind, rather, that the measure of truth is in the world, in reality, and to whatever measure our minds agree with reality, that is the measure that we have truth. In fact, this definition is actually the antithesis of relativism. Relativism says that truth is what I make of it, this definition says that truth is what reality dictates to us.

    Now, we talked earlier about the statement, “God is Truth,” and how that actually followed from the definition of truth. Using this definition of truth, is this actually the case? How is God “conformity of the mind with reality.” Well, it’s rather simple actually. What does reality conform to? Gods mind. God wills reality into existence, and thus, it necessarily conforms to his mind. Therefore, God is truth because reality conforms to His mind. It’s just a direct application of the definition.

    It is important to remind ourselves here, though, that we couldn’t properly understand the statement, “God is Truth,” without first understanding truth itself. This is why it’s important to use this method of understanding things: starting with the simple things that we know and moving to the more complex. If we try to do it the other way around, we end up trying to define God, and we’ll never get anywhere with that.

    I know that this is a rather complicated topic in that most of us don’t really give much thought to these things, but I hope that this was helpful and understandable. I expect to be writing a bit more over this summer, so be on the lookout for more mind-bending content like this.