By Regis Nicoll

From: "No Reply"

All Things Examined - Truth on Trial
By Regis Nicoll

From Fact to Fabrication

"Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when
we unchained this earth from its sun . . . Do we not feel the breath of
empty space? Has it not become colder? ("The Madman," Friedrich Nietzsche)

A little experiment If you've grown weary of vapid chatter about the price
of gas, the latest guest on Oprah, and the merits of cable versus DSL, try
this the next time you're in a social setting: Ask, "Who believes in
truth?" After the room revives from the dead skunk you've tossed on the
carpet, continue, "No, really; who believes that truth exists and that it
is knowable?"

In my experience, whether you do this with co-workers, neighbors, or
church members, the conversation will proceed something like this:

You're talking about absolute truth?

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Well, that all depends.

Depends on what?

On your viewpoint. Have you seen that sketch [
http://www.grand-illusions.com/woman.htm ]-the one that looks like a hag
or a beautiful girl.

Yeah.

Well, which is it-a picture of a girl or a hag?

Maybe it's neither.

Exactly! It all depends.

Can we get off this gerbil run? Depends on what?

Okay. We're all products of nature and nurture which causes us to see
things differently. As to the sketch-I may see a hag, but that gives me no
right to claim that it is a hag, or that others are wrong if they see
something else. In the end, who's to say what it is, or if it's anything
but a poor artist's scribbling?

The interlocutor reflects the prevailing sentiment of the day: truth is
not an objective, overarching statement about reality; it is personal
perception shaped by our genetic and experiential makeup. Among
sophisticates, such relativistic thinking is all the rage. Yet few realize
that their fashionable ideas are really quite old.

NOTHING NEW Nearly 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Protagoras
created quite a stir when he uttered, "Man is the measure of all things."
It inspired a new wave of thinkers to correct those antediluvian
misgivings about transcendent truth.

At the forefront was Gorgias who insisted, "Nothing exists; even if
something exists, nothing can be known about it; and if something could be
known about it, knowledge about it couldn't be communicated to others."
With the myth of certain truth duly exposed, a new school of thought was
born: sophism.

Like the modern-day hag/girl drawing, a favorite sophist illustration was
the parable of the wind: One person feels the wind as cold, while another
feels it as warm. And since the wind can't be both warm and cold, it's the
individual--not external reality--that determines its properties. In fact,
maybe it's the individual that determines the very existence of the wind.
Maybe.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS By the eighteenth century, the relativism of
sophistry was formalized by Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that the world as
it really is-which he referred to as noumena-is hidden from the human
mind. All we have are phenomena-a Kantian term for sensory perceptions
interpreted by the mind. In step with the sophists, Kant challenged the
age-old assumption of objective reality with one sentence: "Mind is the
law-giver to nature."

With all the force of six words, reality was dislodged from its sure
footing to become an observer-dependent creation. It was nothing less than
a Copernican revolution of thought, placing society on a journey in
uncharted waters without map, compass, captain, or helmsman.

After the metaphysics of Kant came the physics of Einstein. At the turn of
the twentieth century, Albert Einstein rattled the cages of the scientific
academy with relativity theory. Measures of time and even length were no
longer experienced universally; they depended on an individual's movement.
However, little did this one-time Swiss patent clerk foresee how his
theories would influence a generation of relativists ready to dismiss
truth with a shrug and a sneer.

A few years later, Werner Heisenberg shook the academy from its very
foundations with quantum theory. Heisenberg discovered that what we "see"
at the building block level of nature, depends on how we "look."
Shockingly, the microcosm wasn't a world of things; it was a plenum of
probabilities.

Relativity theory and quantum theory formed the empirical backbone of
modern relativism. Together, they validated the "truth" about truth that
the Eastern mystics had been telling us all along: objective truth is an
illusion.

EXAMINING THE ELEPHANT By the 1960's, East met West in "The Blind Men and
the Elephant." In the famous fable, six sightless investigators examined
different parts of a pachyderm to conclude that it is like a tree, a rope,
a wall, a branch, a fan, a spear. The lesson? They were all right. The
application? We, too, are blind men with no privileged position to judge
the perspectives of others. The conclusion? If all we have are the records
of our diverse experiences fumbling in the dark, practically speaking,
there is no elephant! Gorgias would be proud.

But if truth cannot be discovered and, in fact, does not exist, it is our
creation. No one takes that more seriously than those raised by parents
who grew up in the '60s. Just ask Korey Rowe and Dylan Avery, two college
students who co-produced the independent film, Loose Change.

COUNTING "LOOSE CHANGE" Loose Change is a $10,000 production its young
producers say "shows direct connection between the attacks of September
11, 2001, and the United States government." According to Rowe and Avery,
the tragedy of 9/11 was not the work of Islamic terrorists; it was a
sinister act of our own government to justify going to war. What's more,
those weren't commercial airliners that crashed into the Pentagon on that
fateful day, they were U.S. cruise missiles. I'm not sure whether to laugh
or cry.

Amazingly, the film has gained currency, especially among college
students, despite eyewitness reports, film footage, commercial jet debris,
recovered black boxes and, oh yes, the fact that all the passengers on
those flights were actually killed and buried!

Even better are the reasons given among young people for supporting the
film: "We don't know the whole truth" (So I guess we just make something
up?); "It's good to raise questions" (Maybe we should also question
whether 2 plus 2 really equals 4?); "It stimulates critical thinking"
(About as much as wasting thought on Holocaust denial theories). But my
personal favorite, a la American Bandstand, is: "[It is] catchy, hip, with
an upbeat soundtrack." That oughta do it.

Loose Change marks the nadir of relativism, in which truth has devolved
from what is "really real"; to what I experience is real; to whatever I
can manufacture and make you believe is real. And all of this with the
support of modern science! Einstein and Heisenberg would have shuddered.

BACK TO ALBERT AND WERNER While quantum weirdness convinced Heisenberg
that the world of protons, positrons, and photons was a mysterium whose
disclosures were observer-dependent, he never doubted the objectivity of
pebbles, parks and people. Even the strange goings-on in the micro-verse
were the results of the quantum potential whose existence was absolute and
universal. Despite the claims of transcendental science, the "elephant"
exists, and not in a "Schrödinger's cat" spectrum of quantum states
splitting off into parallel universes or waiting to materialize by the
observation of a curious observer.

The same is true for Einstein. While he accepted that movement through
space and time was subject-dependent, he knew that-because of the
universal nature of light-movement through spacetime was not. Einstein was
so fully convinced in the objective existence of the universe-at all
levels-that he could never embrace quantum theory because of its
contingent implications.

Sadly, none of this prevented co-opting these great scientists as pioneers
of modern relativism. Sadder yet, is that in our subjecentric universe, we
have lost the ability to distinguish truth from belief.

Unlike beliefs which depend on us and our minds for existence; truth is
independent of us. It is not contingent on our acknowledgement or even our
existence. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell put it, "[T]he truth of a
belief is something not involving beliefs, or (in general) any mind at
all, but only the objects of belief."

Notwithstanding the claims of our modern sirens, truth is true regardless
of our perceptions and beliefs no matter how sincerely we hold them.
Neither is it something we invent. Rather, truth is something we discover.
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, "We can no more create truth than we can create
a new law of nature, like the law of gravity." Sorry Messrs. Rowe and
Avery.

Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer and a Centurion of the Wilberforce
Forum. His "All Things Examined" column appears on BreakPoint every other
Friday. Serving as a men's ministry leader and worldview teacher in his
community, Regis publishes a free weekly commentary to stimulate thought
on current issues from a Christian perspective. To be placed on this free
e-mail distribution list, e-mail him at: centurion51@aol.com.

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