The pastor at church frequently says, “Either Jesus is the truth (and speaks the truth) or he is a liar!” This offers a fundamental, a foundation, a tenant, a belief which I share: there is a TRUTH. Truth exists. Truth is not relative. Truth is not an absolute paradigm shift, a clean, sterile, detached reality that is wholly unconnected from all that existed before and was known before. Truth builds upon itself, like Fibonacci’s numbers, growing and expanding. Truth is infinite. Humans are merely limited by our current capacity to understand. But, if one could introduce Sir Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking, these three men WOULD speak the same truth but from different nodes on the projection of known facts, known realities. But Einstein’s theories did not negate Newtonian physics. Nor did Jimi Hendrix negate Beethoven. Edison’s creations only expand the future of innovation and discovery. It is possible to know how to play a guitar without knowing the classical concertos, but one cannot get from one place without the previous.
And this is my current dilemma, the dilemma of our age: is there a fundamental truth? Or shall we accept this age of relativism? I listened to this podcast this afternoon, and it made we think. To The Best of Our Knowledge: Writing Lies and Truth. And after visiting Salador Dali’s museum in St. Petersburg, and and considering that Dali’s art evolved in a span of time before the double helix of DNA was even KNOWN to exist. And during that time, there were people denying the reality of DNA, fearful that unraveling the helix somehow threatened the stability of the universe, of life itself. From my perspective, to KNOW the structure and function of DNA – how it unzips, copies itself and rewinds itself – is the pathway to my own faith that there is a Great Architect. That some feared this new Truth as antithetical to faith seems preposterous. And yet, that is what happened.
Are we in a similar era? Where people deny the truth, deny knowledge, demand that reality is merely relative and that there is no absolute truth? In an era when so many of faith want to put God back into our day-to-day living, they are often the same people shielding their eyes from Truth. Truth will never negate God, for God is Truth. And we must forever and constantly seek Truth. And test and question. Do not accept being told something blindly. While Faith is blind, Truth is not. Truth is to stare open-eyed into the void, into the maw and still have faith. To have Truth, one can then have Faith.