TRUTH
				Kenneth W. Phifer
				December 8, 2002

Copyright 2002, Kenneth W. Phifer



The Words of Affirmation we speak each Sunday include the phrase, 
"search for truth in love."  What do we mean by truth and why are we 
searching for it?  

In the DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION, W.E. Reese 
lists some 36 definitions of truth as philosophers and theologians have 
framed them across the past three millennia. They range from statements 
about truth being absolute in its non-appearance and fleeting in its material 
appearances to the notion of truth as historical, from the confluence of the 
Good and the Beautiful with the True to truth as the correct description of 
material things, from truth being God to truth being Nature, and several 
dozen more, including a lengthy and incomprehensible discussion of truth as 
a function of language.

Denise Levertov thought of truth as "Marvelous," while Robert Kimball 
finds it elusive. Farid Esack says that "truth, whatever else it may be, is a 
human construction" and Walt Whitman thought truth to be whatever 
satisfies the soul. Adam Gopnick, writing about an interview he had with 
Karl Popper, spoke of truth as "an ugly duckling," the very opposite of 
beauty. Ivan Turgenev thought of truth as a lizard whose tail you grasp only 
to have it come off in your hands while a new and somewhat different tail 
grows on the lizard. 

One philosopher even said that the truth of our age is doubt!

It is hard to know what truth is, but humanity has always known that truth 
matters. It may well be, as Ethel Pochocki contends, that what is truth was 
"… the first question scratched into the sand…after what's for supper?" 

Truth matters.

Mary Jo Leddy recalls the struggles of the Czech people some 30 years ago 
when dissidents began to ask how it was possible to live the truth in a culture 
based on a fundamental lie, when the lie itself was inside of them. It was 
important enough to these people to seek out and live truth that they risked 
imprisonment, impoverishment, and even death to do so. 

Truth matters. 

Religion has always emphasized the vital importance of truth. The wisdom 
of the Jewish tradition teaches that truth, justice, and peace hold the world 
together. Jesus taught that "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make 
you free."

The betrayal of truth is no small part of the horror of the scandal of sexual 
assault by Roman Catholic priests. Thousands of people have not only been 
abused by what was done to them, they have been further abused by those in 
authority who lied about these grievous acts and took no action to stop the 
predators nor to give succor to the victims.

Truth matters.

Truth is necessary for any relationship to flourish. Did he really work late at 
the office or was he seeing another woman? Did she really go to her exercise 
class or was she meeting someone? Without truth, trust is impossible. 
Without trust, intimacy is hell.

Truth matters. 

Ask the former employees of Enron or Worldcom or any of the other 
companies whose top executives hid the truth of the impending collapse of 
their companies while they made off  with huge fortunes. Ask any customer 
who has been the recipient of a faulty product—a building, a car, a 
medicine—whose deficiencies were hidden by an evasion of truth, including 
deliberately deceptive advertising.

Truth matters. 

Does Saddam Hussein represent a serious threat to the United States such 
that we are justified in making pre-emptive war on Iraq? Does the Iraqi 
leader have weapons of mass destruction or not? Are U.S. leaders using Iraq 
as a screen to hide their failure to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and to 
end the dangers posed by Al-Qaeda? 

Truth matters. 

Because it matters, even though it is hard to understand and impossible to 
define, it is important to have some sense of what we mean by truth.

Aristotle wrote that truth is "the saying of what is in that it is and of what is 
not in that it is not."  Truth is a correspondence between what we observe 
and think and that which really is. Truth is a correct description or 
perception of material reality, of ideas, of relationships.

Which does not make truth a simple thing to discover or to grasp. 

Human perception is notoriously faulty. We observe the sun rising in the 
east and setting in the west after moving across the sky all day. In fact, that 
is not what is happening. It is the planet on which we live that is rotating and 
giving us the illusion of the movement of the sun. 

Any good magician can make us think the lady is being sawed in half or that 
the tiger has completely disappeared.

My first assignment as a history major in college was to write an account of 
the day Charles I of England was beheaded. I was told that there were three 
primary sources, three witnesses to his execution, who had written accounts 
of what they observed. Foolishly I assumed that, given that there were three 
witnesses, this was an easy assignment. Read what they wrote, I thought, 
and write a summary of their words.

What I had not counted on was that the recollections would be different, so 
different that they might have been writing of three different events. 

Was he carried out on rubbery legs, weeping and bemoaning his fate, as one 
account had it? Or was he the soul of kingly dignity and Christian 
forbearance, as another account had it? Or was he full of anger at his fate 
and at the men who had brought him low? 

Having lost that paper—probably a good thing—I have no idea what I 
decided was the truth of that day in 1649. I do remember learning very 
quickly that if you do history, you will not have an easy time deciding what 
the facts are or what their importance is or which facts should be discarded 
or what it all means. 

It is not easy to discover truth.

Sometimes we know what the truth is but it is hard to comprehend. 

I find the study of genetics extremely difficult, even at the very basic level at 
which I try to learn about this deep biological truth. I know people who 
cannot comprehend how to read music or what actually happens in a 
baseball game or how to cook the simplest meal, even though the truth of 
these activities is plain for all to see and enjoy.

Truth is often hard to discover and sometimes hard to grasp. 

The Jain religion has a wise story about truth called Six Blind Men and the 
Elephant.

Confronting this animal for the first time, these six men, supposedly wise, 
each touched a different part of the elephant and each proclaimed that the 
part he touched was the whole. 

Touching the side of the elephant, one man said the elephant was like a wall. 

Touching the tusk, a second man said the elephant was like a spear. 

The third, feeling the trunk, said the elephant was like a snake. 

The fourth grabbed a knee and said the elephant was like a tree. 

The fifth put his hands on the ear and thought the elephant was like a huge 
fan. 

The sixth seized on the tail and proclaimed that the elephant was like a rope.

The Jains interpreted this fable to mean that nothing is absolutely true or 
false, that every question can be answered yes and no, that all knowledge is 
relative and partial.

Most of us learn this as part of growing up. We realize how limited our 
knowledge is. We become aware of how often we are wrong about things. 
We reach a point where we know how short a time we have to comprehend 
and how vast in both macroscopic and microscopic directions the world of 
material reality is, not to speak of the complexity of human relationships and 
the enormous pool of ideas that fill our world.

Most of us come to appreciate the truth of Martin Buber's imagery. He 
imagined the world to be like a huge room that is lit by light that comes in 
through pinprick holes in the ceiling. Each of us stands under a particular 
pinprick of light, differently shaped and differently sized so that the light 
that guides us does not appear to be the same as that which guides others, 
though it is the same light. Only fools, said Buber, think that their light is the 
only light, the one true light.

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England and an Orthodox Jew, published 
a book a few months ago called THE DIGNITY OF DIFFERENCE. His 
right-wing colleagues in Judaism have condemned him. Twenty of them 
have charged him with heresy for denying that there is only one truth and 
that is the truth expressed by traditional authentic Orthodox Judaism.

He is charged with heresy for writing such things as this: "No one creed has 
a monopoly on spiritual truth…God has spoken to mankind in many 
languages: through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to 
Muslims." A rabbi friend of mine added the other religions of the world to 
that list and then noted, referring to Sacks' Orthodox critics, that "the 
chutzpah to limit God seemingly knows no bounds."

The phenomenon of certainty about truth is found in every religion, and in 
human beings of every philosophical understanding. It is grounded in Robert 
Kimball's insight that "it is easier to know the truth than to seek it." 

If we suppose that we know the truth, we will then think that every other 
way of understanding is either silly or dangerous. We too easily will slip into 
contempt for those who differ from us or, worse, attempt to prevent them  
from thinking as they do. As one observer noted, "Those who think they 
possess …(the truth) tend to turn into victimizers of the rest, like all the 
other bullies convinced of the superiority of their own race or class or caste 
or blood or wisdom." 

What happens to those who think they know the truth is that they stop 
thinking. Michael Gelven says that truth, once found, "arrests. It halts. Truth 
is that which, in confronting it, permits of no further advance." 

The very complexity of life, the many things that can harm us, the 
knowledge we gain early on that we are going to die make us prey to the 
temptation to grab comforting truths and hold on to them tightly, not letting 
any more knowledge in. It is too scary. 

That is why so many of us live to a large extent by platitudes, by stereotypes, 
by prejudices, by loyalties, by habits, by the way we have always done 
things. Confronting the challenge of truth every day all day is simply beyond 
our capacity. 

When we think we have the truth, we slam the door on doubt. But this 
motivator of thought, this engine of the quest for truth remains inside of us, 
making us uneasy until we have drawn others, by persuasion or by force, to 
accept our view of the truth. 

This is what ideologues and fundamentalists of many religions and political 
stances have done and are doing now. The events in Nigeria which drove the 
Miss World contest out of that country, the murderous assaults on abortion 
clinics in this country, the destruction of mosques and the reciprocal 
destruction of temples in India as Hindus and Muslims battle with their 
swords of truth, the terrorists of Al-Qaeda—all are driven by a sense of 
possessing the truth. 

I share the view of Michael Green that "we should not ever be so arrogant as 
to suppose that the truth is no bigger than our understanding of it." All the 
great religions point to Mystery at the heart of Reality, an affirmation that 
the fundamentalists simply choose to ignore. 

Unitarian Universalists have never ignored the truth of the Ultimate Mystery 
of Existence. Indeed our religion is built upon just such a conception. That is 
why we do not have nor have we ever had creeds. 

Once in our history we had a catechism—the Racovian Catechism of the 
Socinians in Poland. It came with a warning that it was not to be absolutized 
but reviewed on a regular basis to determine the measure in which it still 
made sense.
 
Unitarian Universalists do not have the truth. We do not know the  truth. We 
search for the truth. We do so in love because we agree with Paul Woodruff 
that a "reverence for truth leads to humility in the face of the awesome task 
of getting something right." Humility enables us to love, and love enables us 
to search for truth with others, even when we disagree in methods and 
conclusions.

The truth we search for is not the absolute truth of the universe. That does 
not lie within the scope of human knowledge. The truth we search for is of 
two kinds.
  
The first form of truth is objective truth. Truth in this sense is about things 
that can conclusively be demonstrated to the satisfaction of any one who 
wants to test whether or not something is true. 

Is it true that there are more hours of daylight in the summer months than in 
the winter? We can easily learn this by counting the hours between the 
moment when the sun first appears over the horizon till it disappears over 
the opposite horizon. If we do this every day for a year, we will clearly see 
that in the warmer months of summer there are more daylight hours than in 
the colder months of winter. 

That is an objective truth.

Many objective truths are determined for us because we do not have time to 
measure everything, see everything, test everything. 

Many of the drugs we use fall into this category. People with education and 
training and experience run clinical tests to determine what dosage of a drug 
is efficacious and safe. After a lengthy process of testing and evaluation and 
screening, a drug makes it to the market with certain standard dosages that 
are to be used for certain symptoms and certain diseases. 

That is an objective truth.

There are many objective truths of history. We know, for example, to use 
my earlier historical case, that Charles I of England was executed in the year 
1649. About that there is no dispute, even though there is disagreement 
about his conduct as he faced death.

We know that George Washington was the first president of the United 
States and that George W. Bush is the current president. We may disagree 
about what Washington did or did not do since presidents often act? through 
subordinates, but no one challenges the fact of his being the president. We 
may applaud or be dismayed by the actions of our current president, but all 
agree that he is the holder of that office.

In all areas of life there are objective truths. They deal with concrete 
realities. They are almost always collective in nature, that is, truths either 
subject to anyone's verification or truths that we all agree on.

Truths that are subject to verification are scientific truths. 

The law of gravity is such a truth. That the human story is one of conception, 
pregnancy, and birth followed by the development of that person from 
infancy into childhood through youth and then adulthood on to old age and 
death—barring the intervention of disease or accident that ends the life 
early-- is also such a truth. 

That evolution happened, though there are many variations on the theories of 
how it happened, is a truth upon which all reasonable people agree and about 
which there is sufficient evidence to make it certain. 

There are also truths upon which we all agree, such as moral truths, even 
though they do not have the same standards of verifiability as scientific 
truths. Their standard of verifiability is simply human experience, what 
works.

A moral truth upon which humanity does not disagree is that it is a good 
thing to be kind to one another. The truth of kindness is seen on battlefields 
where even enemy soldiers are cared for.  The truth of kindness is seen in 
the negative fact that babies who are  not given loving attention do not 
thrive. The truth of kindness is seen in the words, "I'm sorry, please forgive 
me," when we know we have done someone wrong and that it is a bad thing 
to treat people like that.

Truth is objective, collective, verifiable, agreed upon after long experience.

Truth is also subjective and highly idiosyncratic.

It is subjective in the sense that each of us will have experiences that others 
do not have. We will learn from those experiences truths about our lives that 
may be important or of only passing significance. They may well be truths 
that apply to no one else.

As we grow up we learn truths about our bodies that no one else can tell us. 
We learn postures that are comfortable, ways of walking that get us where 
we want to go, tastes that will determine what foods we eat and what 
toothpaste we use and what gum we chew. We will learn the ways in which 
we can extend our bodies beyond our normal activities, say by learning how 
to be a gymnast or learning how to play a violin. Sometimes what we learn 
is that we cannot do these things very well. 

I learned at a pretty young age that I would never be a painter and soon 
thereafter came to the truth of my incapacity as a baseball player. It was at 
roughly the same age that I gave my first public speech and gained the truth 
of my ability to stand in front of people and talk and the truth of how much I 
enjoy doing that.

These are all individual truths that may or may not apply to other people. 
Even when they are similar, they are not all likely to be the same talents and 
disabilities as mine. This particular combination is a unique truth about me, 
as well as the unique combination of cells that make up my body and the 
ways in which it works and does not work.

Subjective truth is also found in relationships. I was quite taken with 
something that Wesley Ariarajah, a Methodist minister from Sri Lanka, 
wrote. "When my daughter tells me I'm the best daddy in the world, and 
there can be no other father like me, she is speaking the truth, for this comes 
out of her experience. She is honest about it; she knows no other person in 
the role of her father. But, of course, it is not true in another sense. For one 
thing, I myself know friends who, I think, are better fathers than I am. Even 
more importantly, one should be aware that in the next house there is 
another little girl who also thinks her daddy is the best father in the world. 
And she too is right."

Religion is largely a subjective truth. Grounded in the human need for some 
explanation of the fact of existence and some sense of meaningfulness that 
attaches to our personal lives, we have created religions to help us cope with 
the world. While objectively religions are built around moral teachings that 
humanity collectively has determined are true because they help us to live 
well, which religion we identify with depends at least in part on the religious 
language we are comfortable with. 

For most of history and in most countries to this day, that religious language 
will be the one we were raised in. But often—indeed frequently today—that 
is not true. We convert to another religion from the one in which we grew 
up. Of Unitarian Universalists that is overwhelmingly true as 75% of our 
members were not raised as UU's.

The point is that which religious language we speak—Christian, Taoist, 
Muslim, atheistic, pagan, Buddhist, Jewish, humanistic, or some other—is 
the language we regard as true. Subjectively that is correct. Objectively it is 
a dangerous truth if not seen as the partial truth it is—true for me but not 
necessarily true for all people.

Hans Kueng once wrote that "all religions are true; my religion is the only 
true religion." He meant that all religions are objectively full of truth, 
demonstrated by the way in which each of them addresses the needs of its 
followers and espouses universally agreed upon truths like love and justice 
and peace. But the one true religion in which I can speak and listen and learn 
is the one I am a part of.

The world would be a far safer place if all humanity understood both the 
importance and the limits of subjective truth.

What are we searching for when we affirm each week that we "search for 
truth in love" and why does it matter? 

The truth we search for is not the absolute truth of the universe, which we 
cannot know. Those who think they can, or worse, those who think they do, 
are dangerously deluded. They will either end in despair when they learn 
they cannot know the whole truth or, in their thoughtless certainty, they will 
become a menace to other people as they seek to defend their indefensible 
position.

The truth we search for is of two kinds, objective and subjective.

Objective truth is the truth we share. It is truth that is verifiable. It is truth we 
agree on because long human experience has demonstrated its veracity or 
because we can test its efficacy.

Subjective truth is personal. It is about our own individual bodies, our own 
individual understandings, our own unique ways, the language each of us  
uses to express ourselves, the lens through which each of us sees the world, 
the paradigm that structures our questions and our answers. 

We know that the most secure objective truths can be challenged and 
changed. Scientific truth illustrates this on an almost daily basis.

We know that subjective truth is constantly open to question and to 
alteration.

Objective truth and subjective truth challenge and correct and inform each 
other. Both are part of the dynamic process of searching for truth in a 
universe that is itself not static but dynamic.

Think of the elephant in the Jain fable. Think of the added measure of truth 
the Blind Men would have had if they had looked at the many other parts of 
the Elephant—they only examined one each. Think if they had observed the 
elephant in motion, perhaps by riding on it as it moved.  Think of  what a 
more complete understanding of the elephant they would have had if they 
could have learned about the elephant's feelings, thoughts, desires, 
motivations, however rudimentary these things might be. All these 
additional factors of an elephant's reality would have greatly enlarged the 
truth the Blind Men could have learned.  

In the end, we are never going to know the whole truth, of elephants or of 
Reality, but a worthy life, an interesting life can be built around the search 
for truth. It is a life that is ever learning, every expanding its scope, ever 
reaching out to draw larger and larger circles of knowledge and love and 
concern. 

Those who search for truth do not, as the blind men did, shout their own 
certainities at each other. They engage in mutually supportive conversation 
so that together they can gain some insight into the nature of this beast called 
Reality and figure out together how best to live with what is really true.

This is the UU approach to truth, that it matters, that we can never know it, 
that we should always be searching for it, that we share with others the fruits 
of our endeavors. 

It's a good way to live!









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