Why I Don’t Believe We Know the Truth Yet

I get into social tension sometimes when people try to trick me into saying I don’t believe in truth. Of course that’s not true. I do believe in truth, I just haven’t found anybody, apart from Jesus, who represents it absolutely. And we’d all have to agree that while Jesus was truth and represented truth He didn’t articulate it in a way it could be measured and tested and proved.

Truth is bigger than words and too large to be stuffed into a tiny human mind. Otherwise, let’s be honest, truth isn’t very interesting.

There are all kinds of truth. It’s true I’m sitting on a couch writing this blog, for instance. That’s an absolute truth. And then there’s contextual truth, such as thou shalt not kill, unless of course you believe in the death penalty.

Let’s not pretend truth is always fixed. It’s often fluid.

I recently sat next to a physicist at a dinner and in small talk he found out I was a Christian writer. He immediately gruffed. He said he’d little regard for Christianity because Christians are always calling things true that aren’t. What he meant was in his discipline, he had to submit the concept of truth to verified tests and data while we could just use the term as willy nilly as an anchor on Fox News.

I agreed with my new friend that many of the things Christians believe are true are simply not verifiable. We can not verify the Bible is true, for instance, and yet within the Bible itself truth is poetically rather than specifically defined. Jesus says I am truth, which is no scientific definition.

*Photo by Curious District, Creative Commons

That said, however, I like something Albert Einstein said, he said, “Gravitation is not responsible for falling in love,” and I think he’s right. I suspect what he means is there’s something more, something neither the theologian or the physicist can explain.

Do I believe in absolute truth? I do.

Do I believe we can know what absolute truth is? Yes, but only some of it.

Why? Because some of it is too big and we aren’t capable of understanding it.

Am I comfortable with that? Yes, I’m as comfortable as a child with his father, knowing half the things I believe are fiction and half are true and the majority of what is isn’t in my head at all. But He’s around all the same. And He is truth.

And that’s nothing anybody can prove.

Why I Don’t Believe We Know the Truth Yet is a post from: Storyline Blog