Grace Institute: Relating to You World: A Test for Truth

A Test for Truth Relating To Your World Spring 2007

How do we determine what is and isn't true? What are the objective criteria we can use to develop proofs of a belief system? What is a valid “test for truth?”

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Introduction: What Is Proof?

Literally defined, proof is the “evidence establishing the validity of a given assertion.” But what evidence is necessary for someone to establish that validity? How much evidence is enough? What constitutes proof? The implication from the definition is that proof is in the eye of the beholder.

Jesus tells a story in Luke 16:19-31, about a rich man who is sent to hell. There, across a chasm, he sees a poor man named Lazarus with Abraham in Paradise. The rich man pleads with Abraham to let him return to earth to warn his brothers so they won't end up in hell as he has.

“And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.'

“He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.'” (Luke 16:30-31 ESV)

What Jesus is saying, proof is in the mind of the beholder. If the prophets weren't proof enough, there is no guarantee that someone coming back from the dead would be also. For some, there can never be enough proof. Jesus did miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and even rising from the dead. Yet the religious leaders of his day demanded again and again that he prove himself by showing a sign.

(Mark 8:11-12 ESV) The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, "Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation."

It is not that Jesus refused to give proof for his claims. Rather, he refused to show a sign to those who already had decided not to believe. If you have already made up your mind about something, no proof, no matter how compelling will change your mind. Jesus knew this and was not about to play into this foolishness.

We can think of it in another illustration:

A man who had just been in an automobile accident was taken to the Emergency Room of a hospital. It was a terrible accident and the man was badly injured. The doctor working on him said to the man, “sir, you are lucky to be alive!”

“But I am not alive,” said the man.

“What are you talking about,” said the Doctor. “Your injuries are serious, but you are certainly alive.”

“No, I cannot be alive. No one could have survived that accident. I know that I am dead,” replied the patient.

“Sir, you are alive. I am a doctor. I am trained to know is someone is dead or alive. And I can assure you that you are not dead.”

“But I experienced the accident. I saw the remains of my car, and I know for sure that there is no way anyone could have survived that crash,” he replied.

“Look. I will prove to you that you are dead. Do dead men bleed?” asked the doctor.

“No. Everyone knows that dead men don't bleed,” replied the patient.

So the doctor took out a scalpel and cut the man on the arm. Blood came gushing out of his arm.

“Well, I'll be darned,” said the patient. “Dead men do bleed!”

Beyond having different criteria for proof, there is always the possibility that conflicting evidence might be raised. Because our minds are finite and capable of only partial understanding of anything, it is not possible to absolutely prove anything. There is always the possibility of new contradictory information. What we call “proof” is probably better expressed as a conclusion we have come to on the basis of available evidence, filtered through an imperfect reasoning process.

Before we can effectively communicate the “reason for our hope,” we must first how people test evidences for truth.

Various Tests for Truth

There have been several different systems of philosophy developed over the years with the intention of determining what ultimate truth is. The purpose of this section is to survey the dominant methodologies, their strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately develop an adequate methodology for determining truth . We are going to look at six major systems:

• Rationalism
• Fideism
• Experientialism
• Evidentialism
• Pragmatism
• Combinationalism

Rationalism

Rationalism stresses that truth can be known through the innate reasoning of the human mind. It is most easily understood as a contrast to empiricism, which stressing the senses. Basically, all rationalist start with a premise (or several premises) which they claim are self-evident and undeniable, and then proceed logically (Cause & effect, law of non- contradiction, etc.) to a conclusion, usually that God does exist.

Basic Tenets:

• Reality is rationally (i.e. mathematically) analyzable.
• There are innate ideas or principles known in the mind which are independent of experience. The mind is not a blank slate. “I think, therefore I am.”
• Truth is derived by logical deduction from self-evident principles.
• There is rational certainty in arguments for God.
• The rationally inescapable is the real.

Valuable Contributions:

• Basic laws of thought (logic). Unless the law of non-contradiction holds, there is no possibility of knowing truth.
• The mind is not a blank slate, or nothing could ever be known.
• Reality is knowable.

Fatal Flaws of Rationalism

• It is invalid to move from thought to reality or from the possible to the actual. Logic is the recognition of the order of reality, it does not create reality.
• The rationally inescapable is not the real. A triangle must have three sides, but that doesn't mean one exists at all. It is logically possible that nothing exists at all.
• Claiming the undeniability of self as a way to bridge thought and reality is not a rational argument, it is an existential one.
• Premises are not purely rationally defensible. There is not strictly rational way to establish rationalism.
• Logic is at best a negative test for truth.

Fideism

Fideism is a system of belief that places its ultimate emphasis on faith, rather than reason. If there is no purely rational or evidential way to establish Christianity, then truth rests solely on faith. It evolved primarily as a response to the increasing reliance on human reasoning made popular by rationalism and much of the early fideistic writings were intended as "shock treatment.” It generally insists that the heart is the bedrock of all knowledge (“we just intuitively know”). Probably the most famous fideistic argument is Pascal's Wager.

Either God is or he is not. If you wager he does exist and he doesn't, you haven't lost anything. If he does exist, you win everything. Therefore, wager on God. From a standpoint of reason, faith in God is an even bet, but the existential dice are highly loaded in favor of having faith.

Basic Tenets

• Faith alone is the way to God.
• Truth is not found in the purely rational or objective realm.
• Evidence and reason do not point definitively in the direction of God.
• Tests for truth are existential, not rational.
• Truth comes from the top down. God's grace is the source of how we can know truth.

Valuable Contributions

• Man can neither rationally comprehend nor logically demonstrate the existence of the transcendent God.
• Neither evidence nor reason is the basis for one's commitment to God. Faith is based on who God is and not on the alleged evidence of His existence. Reason alone cannot produce faith.
• Faith is more than intellectual- it is volitional.
• Religious truth is ultimately truth about a Person (God) that must be appropriated by another person (us). Truth ultimately has a personal dimension, not merely an impersonal rationalization.

Fatal Flaws

• Fideism confuses epistemology (knowing) and ontology (being). In other terms, it is may be correct that God exists, but simply begs the question as to how we know that. I believe it because I believe it…
• It also confuses belief in and belief that there is a God. It overlooks the need to know that something exists before one can put his faith in that thing.
• Fideism assumes that because presuppositions are unavoidable, they are also unjustifiable.
• Fideism really offers no test for truth. If a fideist offers a justification for his then he or she is no longer a fideist.
• If it does not allow the principle of non-contradiction, then it cannot discern truth, and if it does allow the principle, than it is no longer fideism.

Experientialism

Experientialism maintains that experience alone is the basis for discerning truth. The experience may be special or general, private or public, but ultimately the experience is self-attesting and verifies truth. Experientialism is very broad because everything boils down to experience. The natural world provides physical experiences, reasoning is a mental experience, and mysticism is a supernatural experience. The issue, therefore, is not whether experiences exist (we cannot meaningfully deny that they do) but rather if they alone are a basis for discerning what is true from what is false.

Basic Tenets

• Truth is primarily experienced, but only secondarily expressed. Truth does not reside in what we conclude about the experience, it is the experience.
• Experience is the final court of appeals for religious truth.
• Religious experiences are ultimately self-verifying, since there is no outside authority by which to judge them.
• Since truth cannot be purely expressed, God is actually indescribable, but not unknowable.

Positive Contributions

• Experience is the “stuff” out of which all religious truth must be built.
• Nothing is broader than experience.
• Knowledge grows out of awareness, and expressions grow out of experience, not the reverse.

Fatal Flaws

• Experiences are neither true nor false. Experience is something you have, truth is a judgment you make about the experience.
• An experience cannot be used to support or prove the truth itself. The only truth you can claim is that you actually had the experience. The “stuff” of truth is found in experience, but not the support for truth.
• No experience is self-interpreting. Being short-changed takes on a different meaning if it was deliberate and not accidental.
• Experience can be interpreted differently. Each major worldview is able to account for all the data of experience. To use experience to justify experience is to argue in a circle.
• Experience in itself has no meaning. Meaning comes from context. Experience is a source of truth, but not a test for it.
• Experientialism is either meaningless, self-defeating, or begs the question.

Evidentialism

Christianity is a historical religion and it has been common for Christian apologists to appeal to the historical evidence of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as verification of its claim to be true. Evidentialism not only includes evidence from history, but also present-day evidence particularly found in nature (the teleological argument, for example). In addition, there are also appeals to future evidence (i.e. “you'll find out if God is real when you die”).

Basic Tenets

• It is empirically or experientially based. Truth is based in facts or events.
• There is a distinction between facts and interpretation.
• The facts "speak for themselves" and are self-interpreting.
• There are special or unique facts that are definitive in determining truth.
• Truth must be general and observable or it cannot be substantiated.

Positive Contributions

• Evidence must be public and objective. Private or subjective events are not really evidence.
• Truth is factually based.
• Meaning is not arbitrary. Facts have contexts.

Fatal Flaws

• Evidence or facts only have meaning when interpreted, and they cannot interpret themselves without begging the question. It does not make sense to speak of miracles unless you first know there is a God.
• What is a miracle of God to a Christian is an anomaly of nature to a scientist.
• Meaning does not grow out of an event. It is given to the event.
• On a purely factual basis, there is no way to sort out important from unimportant facts.
• Appealing to future evidence may hold the hope of vindication, but does not prove much in the present.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism contends that one cannot think or feel truth, but can discover it by attempting to live it. Truth is not what is consistent or rationally adequate but rather what is workable. Pragmatism strictly speaking is not a test for truth but rather a theory of meaning, where the meaning of something can be found by studying its practical results (“by their fruits you shall know them”). By inference, if it works, it must have meaning, therefore it's “true.”

Basic Tenets

• The testing ground of truth is human experience. Is it livable? Does it work? What is its cash value? It is future-focused, always considering the potential outcome of an event or action.
• Conclusions are tentative; you don't have omniscience on how it will turn out.

Positive Contributions

• It provides a balance against a purely rational approach. It doesn't consider causes as much as it judges effects.
• Religious truth is finally confirmed in personal experience. Human experience is the proving ground where brilliant theories have been mercilessly crushed by brutal gangs of facts. If a religion, which claims life-transforming experiences, doesn't deliver, it should be disqualified.
• Much of our knowledge is tentative (now we see through a glass darkly).
• It contains a personal, volitional element moving beyond rationally believing that God exists to living as if we did.

Fatal Flaws

• Results do not establish what is true, but only what works.
• We may mistakenly attribute the results to the wrong cause.
• We cannot know ultimate consequences, at this point pragmatism becomes fideism.
• It cannot discern between competing world views, many work for their adherents.

Combinationalism

Since pure approaches using experientialism, rationalism, evidentialism, and pragmatism have all failed, hope for an adequate methodology for determining truth leads us to consider that a combination of two or more of these approaches may work. The starting points all differ, some begin in empirical experience, some with an innate knowledge of the principles - of Scripture, etc. but the test ultimately ends up with three major considerations: (1) consistency, (2) factual adequacy, and (3) moral or religious relevance.

Basic Tenets

• No one test for truth is adequate. Truth must be factual, rational, and relevant to moral or religious issues.
• Everyone must pick a starting point or premise. These starting points are all important and are not self-justifying, Neither are they philosophically neutral, since once you pick the premise, the conclusion is inevitable. Formal logic is empty.
• Experience is not self-interpreting.
• Truth is modeled after a scientific hypothesis.

Positive Contributions

• Facts do not speak for themselves. They require meaning, which is superimposed on them from the outside before truth can be known.
• Combinationalism is comprehensive, and recognizes that a world-view must cover all that is in the world.
• It is adequate within certain contexts. Given a certain perspective, there is often only one way to correctly interpret the facts (i.e. tackling someone is ok if the context is a football game).

Fatal Flaws

• When testing between world-views, you cannot presuppose the truth of a given framework without begging the question. It does not make sense to speak of an act of God, unless there is a God who can act.
• It is a "leaky bucket" argument. If empiricism is not an adequate test for truth, and rationalism is not adequate, then combining them will not hold truth any more than two leaky buckets in series will hold water.
• Facts require a viewpoint.

An Adequate Test for Truth

Tests between World-Views

While raw rationalism has serious flaws, it does establish for us that truth is logical. Logic has been defined as the mental recognition of the order of reality. Therefore, if you can reason in a logical manner, the truth will eventually surface. There are two “tests” which must both be satisfied in order to conclude that something is true:

• The truth must not be self-contradictory or self-defeating.
• Truth cannot be directly self-contradictory. For example, “there are no absolutes.”
• Truth cannot be indirectly self-contradictory. For example, “I cannot know anything about reality.”
• The truth must not be self-denying.
• Definitional undeniability. For example, “All triangles have three sides.”
• Theoretical undeniability. For example, “God is uncaused”
• Existential undeniability. That is to say: a person cannot deny his or her own existence. Nor can a person deny that reality exists. As Rick Taylor says, “This is as real as it gets.”

Example: Disproving Agnostics

There are two basic kinds of agnostics: Those who claim that the existence and nature of God are not known, and those who hold God to be unknowable. The first does not exclude the possibility of all religious knowledge, so we will concern ourselves with the second.

Agnostics believe that any statement that is neither purely a relation of ideas (definitional or mathematical) nor a matter of fact (empirical or factual) is meaningless. All statements about God fall outside these categories, and therefore all knowledge of God becomes impossible. This is a radical empiricism that claims that all knowledge is either derived from the senses or by the reflection in the mind of what the senses have told us.

The corollary to this is that Cause and Effect cannot be known, and is simply based on custom.

Using the test for truth above, we can come to the following conclusion about agnosticism:

• There are three possibilities regarding our knowledge about God:
  • Agnosticism: We can know nothing about God
  • Dogmatism: We can know everything about God
  • Realism: We can know some things about God
• Complete agnosticism is self-defeating: “I know enough about God to know that I cannot know anything about God.” We cannot even think of reality that is unthinkable. It is not possible to say “that” something is without simultaneously declaring something about “what” it is.
• Denying Cause & Effect is also self-defeating because if there is not a necessary reason (or cause) for the denial, then the denial may not be true. And if there is a reason, then the denial is self-defeating.
• Only an omniscient mind could be totally agnostic.

Example: The Proof Of God's Existence

Let's take the opposite conclusion then. Let's preview the concept of the existence of God using the above tests for truth.

• Begin with existential undeniability. We cannot meaningfully deny our own existence. One has to exist in order to deny their existence. Therefore it is logically impossible to deny your current existence.
• One cannot meaningfully deny that they have not always existed. While I must come to the conclusion that I exist now, I cannot say for certain that I have always existed. Furthermore, if I always existed, then I would be uncaused. If I was uncaused, then I must necessarily be God based on the theoretical undeniability.
• Everything finite must have a cause of sufficient complexity and capacity to produce it.
• Because I did not always exist, I must be finite. Because I must be finite, there must have been something more complex and of greater capacity than me to cause my existence to begin.
• Ultimately, that cause must be infinite, or uncaused.
• That which is uncaused, through theoretical or definitional undeniability, is God.
• Therefore, God must exist.

Tests within world-views

The following tests do not prove that a world-view is true. They don't determine what is true, but can help ascertain what is not true.

• Internal Consistency- Truth does not contradict itself.
• Empirical Affirmability – Truth reasonably explains the world around us.
• Evidential Support – Truth can reasonably account for historical events.

Over the next several weeks as we explore various world-views, our goal will be to use these adequate tests for truth to determine the validity of those worldviews.

Bibliography

Geisler, Norman L. Christian Apologetics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1998.