When Jesus was on trial for his life before the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, Pilate reportedly asked him, “What is truth?” To which Jesus gave no answer. Perhaps he didn’t have the energy to explain such a weighty matter to a Roman bureaucrat. After all, it had been a difficult week. Or perhaps there isn’t any answer to be given. I prefer the latter option. Certainly I’m not about to stick my neck out very far on an issue that Jesus side-stepped and that centuries of philosophical debate have failed to settle. But I’ll stick it out just far enough to say that whatever worldview we adopt is not the final truth.
We humans have a dangerous tendency to assume that our particular culture’s worldview is more right than any other and that the whole world would be better off if everyone believed as we do. In fact we’ve proven only too willing to wage war and slaughter countless millions in an effort to persuade them that “I’m right and you’re wrong” – especially if our particular deity gives us any encouragement in that direction.
Worldviews with a strong religious component – (and that includes the vast majority of worldviews throughout history) – seem the most likely to generate such behaviour, born of the conviction that God Himself has ordained this particular set of beliefs and practices, revealed through His chosen prophet and subsequently inscribed in a Holy Book. Such worldviews do indeed claim to be “the truth”, however bizarre that truth may seem to non-believers. So Zionist Jews genuinely believe that the Creator of this universe has decreed that, for all eternity, the bit of ground on this planet known as Palestine belongs to His chosen people, regardless of who else may have occupied it for the past 2000 years. Conservative Christians actually pray for Armageddon – that final cataclysmic end-of-the-world battle when Jesus will return to destroy the forces of evil and take his faithful followers with him in a bodily ascension up through the clouds into heaven. And Muslim jihadists have no qualms about blowing up innocent men, women and children in the name of Allah. All these believers, whatever their tradition, have no doubt that their worldview is the absolute, final, and eternal truth.
I can only imagine that clinging to such a claim yields a measure of comfort in the face of life’s uncertainties and enables those who feel blessed with such truth to regard themselves as special and superior to those who adhere to a different truth. I’m not about to argue that their worldview is false – after all, who knows what the truth really is – but surely this claim is extremely dangerous in today’s global community. It seems to me that a core tenet of any emerging worldview must be the recognition that no one – not the prophets of old nor the scientists of today – has the truth wrapped up. Yes, we each need a worldview to frame our experience and give meaning to our lives. Can we embrace whatever worldview makes sense to us, acknowledge that it isn’t written in heaven, and bet our life on it nonetheless? Surely what is required in today’s world is a heaping does of humility, together with a deep respect for all those whose worldview is different than our own.
Can anything be regarded as the truth? There are those, quite the opposite of hard-core religious believers, who say that our experience of the world is shaped by our sensory equipment and the mental constructs into which we fit the data. Since we can never be sure that our perceptual constructs accurately represent any out-there reality, perception is all there is. The world that we experience is always our own construction. Who then can say what the truth is?
It’s a position that seems impractical to me. Trusting the evidence of our senses, we once believed that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Now, thanks to telescopes, from Galileo to Hubble, we see the world as a sphere that revolves around the sun. Is that true? It’s certainly more true than what we used to believe. And its truth seems confirmed by the fact that we can make very accurate predictions based on it. Our mental construction of what exists is a sufficiently true and accurate representation of what really does exist out there that we can send men in rockets to the moon and back. For all practical purposes, we can say that our current picture of our solar system is absolutely true.
Lots of things can be said to be true based either on consensual validation or sufficient supporting evidence. Is it true that I was born in Montreal on 19 November 1934? Absolutely! Not simply because my parents said so but because there is ample documentary evidence to support it. Is it true that a Jewish holocaust took place in Europe in the 1940s? Absolutely! – despite the denials of Neo-Nazis for whom this fact does not sit comfortably with their agenda. Okay, how about the Big Bang? Well, the supporting evidence is looking pretty good, but we may be reluctant yet to proclaim it as the final truth. After all, only 50 years ago we had very good evidence to support the idea that the universe is eternal.
Deciding what’s true or not becomes much more difficult regarding why something happened or is happening. Why, for example, is that apple falling from the tree? Newton called it gravity – a force between two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Pushing the why question further, he speculated that the Earth, like a sponge, drinks up a constant stream of fine aethereal matter that falls from the heavens and causes physical bodies located above the Earth to descend. Wow! But that was over 300 years ago. No one today is likely to accept that explanation as true. Einstein proposed a different explanation in which gravity is due to the effects of material bodies on the shape of four-dimensional space-time. And presently some physicists are proposing that gravity is caused by one-dimensional “strings” or filaments vibrating in an 11-dimensional universe. Double-Wow! So do we know the truth of why an apple falls from a tree? We’re not even close.
So too when it comes to our worldviews – those over-arching systems of belief that frame our lives in the context of the BIG questions – not questions about which we can decide the truth, such as when I was born or whether the holocaust really happened, or even about what causes apples to fall from trees, but the really BIG questions about why is there anything at all, and is the evolution of this universe going anywhere, and what if anything are the implications of this for what we human beings are doing here and what may be the purpose of our lives, etcetera? Concerning such issues, we will never know “the truth”. The best we can hope for are working hypotheses that we can test in the course of our living, that will guide our behaviour in ways that are both creative and benign, and that will yield a satisfying sense of meaning.
Therefore be humble, ever curious, and always tolerant of those who see things differently than you.
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