More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

by Bernardo Kastrup

The third culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with predictions and deals with future possibilities. For instance, imagine that Italian seismologists detect earth tremors in Sicily, suspecting that Mount Etna is going to erupt once again. A first team of seismologists runs the measured data through a first computer model and concludes that Etna, despite the tremors, isn’t going to erupt any time soon. A second team then runs the same data through a second model and concludes that Etna is indeed going to erupt within a week. Imagine that the models of both teams, though different, are theoretically sound and internally consistent. Nonetheless, if Etna actually erupts within the week, only the second team’s conclusion will supposedly have ever been true. Indeed, a true prediction requires more than just theoretical soundness and internal consistency: it must also correspond to a future state of affairs independent of subjective, internal expectations. Let us call this third concept of truth ‘predictive truth.’