Jamie Dew: Hey, everybody is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: And we're welcoming you back to our podcast, The Towel & Basin.
Joe Fontenot: That's right. Jamie, my question today centers around this concept of absolute truth. Plenty of people in the world argue that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Some people could possibly argue that Christianity might work with some kind of relative truth, I don't know. Is there such a thing as absolute truth?
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Good question. I'm obviously in the camp and a big fan of the claim and the idea that yes, there is absolute truth. I think that Christianity is making those kinds of claims. We need to quickly and very clearly disentangle two separate ideas. That is what's real, and what's true about what's real from what we may perceive. And I think most of the arguments or most of the dispositions towards people, that claim, well, there's no such thing as absolute truth, they're born generally speaking, out of the very different perceptions that people have of reality. So for example, let me illustrate it this way, imagine that it's Christmas time as we're doing this podcast right now, it's not Christmas time, but imagine it's Christmas time. And I, and my kids are sitting on the couch while my wife is doing something to the Christmas tree, maybe she's putting the lights on the tree.
Imagine that I'm sitting there with no lenses on or something like that. And I see the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree and they come off with a yellow issue. My son is looking at the Christmas tree and he has a set of glasses on, that are blue tinted and he's going to see blue tinted lights. Imagine one of my other kids has a set of lights on that actually shows it the same color as what I see with no lens, but it multiplies. And so for every one light you see, three lights. And so it looked like from that view that there's actually three lights. There's no arguing the fact that indeed each of us have three distinct perspectives about the one thing, lights perspectives. Our perspectives do differ very radically. And this explains, goodness, pick any topic in our world today, politics, art, morality, you name it, there's wildly different perspectives on what's true and what's good and everything.
Those are just perspectives, and those are situated within individual people. But notice that each of us is looking at one single thing, the tree. And there is one tree and it is one way or it is another, it cannot be all three of those ways, it seems very foolish to say. It's one thing to say that the three people will see the tree different ways, but it's an entirely another thing to say that there are actually three fundamentally different realities themselves, that there are three different trees, if you will, that each of us were looking at. That's something different, and that frankly. I can just say that sounds very crazy. Look, recognizing that yes, people see things very differently from culture to culture, religion to religion, person, to person, that's a reality.
But the fact of the matter of it is, there is a reality and something is either true about that reality or not true about that reality. And whatever it is that's true of that reality seems to be independent of any one person's perspective. So as such, I'm inclined very strongly to argue that there just is still absolute truth. There are some things that are true and there are just some things are false. And granted, two people may see very differently. Our job is to try to detangle our perspectives and to try to work through our perspectives and pull out the faulty perceptions, and pull out the false views or the bad lenses, so to speak and get at as close as we possibly can to what's actually there. Despite the large trajectory of postmodern thought over the last couple of decades, I remain very optimistic that we can and often do have great success in figuring out the way that the world really is. And so I still am very much inclined to say, yes, there's absolute truth.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. And that totally makes sense. But given these different perspectives and so forth, how can we really know when something is true? How do we know that the tree is green when we have blue glasses on and so forth and so on?
Jamie Dew: Well, let me try to answer that question next. Let me actually, maybe pose at even another question in between the one I'm just answering and the one you've just asked. That is, how we know it or how we get at it obviously that's the most important application question we can get at. But I think before that, we have to get squared up and straight on, what do we mean by truth itself? So what does it mean for something to be true? Is a question we would ask. Okay. And here I would just simply put it this way, without going into a history philosophy here, I would simply say that look, throughout the vast majority of Western and even non Western, a lot of people will try to say, this is just a Western thing. It's really not. Throughout, most of us say human history.
There's a particular way that most humans have talked about truth. And then there's some recent developments with postmodernism. So let's talk about the way it's normally been thought of. Now what we're talking about here is what philosophers will sometimes call propositional truth. Propositional truth or like basically claims or statements that can be stated in propositional form. For example, today is Tuesday. That is either true or false, that statement, that proposition. I am wearing white sneakers, is a proposition. And those statements are either true or they're false. Really what we're interested in is what's propositional truth? How do we know when a proposition is actually true and what does it mean for it to be true? And the way that most people throughout history have thought about truth, definitionally, in other words what they'd say it is, is that they would say truth is that which corresponds to reality itself.
So there is truth least and propositions. So in other words, a proposition is true if that proposition corresponds to the way things actually are. So take the two claims that I just gave here, the two propositions I just gave. Today is Tuesday. Now, when people are listening to this podcast, I think it drops on a Friday, it won't be Tuesday for them, but for you and I that are doing this right now, as I make that statement, today is Tuesday, it is in fact, Tuesday. When I make the claim that I'm wearing white sneakers, I am in fact wearing white sneakers. So here are two propositions and we would judge them to be true based off of the fact that the propositions correspond to what's actually happening in the world, or is actually true in the world at this given moment.
So statement itself in those two cases is sort of located or index to that particular moment. And at that particular moment, it is Tuesday and I am wearing white sneakers. In short, the correspondents, their truth says that a statement is true if in fact it corresponds to reality. What this does is it keeps our beliefs, it keeps our knowledge claims, it keeps our ideas about what is true based in reality not fiction or fairytale. And this is clearly why we don't think that there are things like unicorns and Santa Claus and things like that, is because as it turns out, there's just not anything like that. So starkly speaking, I would argue that for the vast majority of at least Western thought, that's Christianity and non Christianity, the vast majority of Western thought, and I would say even for most Eastern thought, that which is true is that which corresponds to reality.
Now, some people say, in the Eastern world they would deny this, and you may very well indeed find an Eastern philosophy in a non Western philosophy, different people that would argue very differently than what I just argued about what truth is. In fact, some of them may not even take the question up about what's true. But when you talk to these people and you listen to them, and they dialogue about what is and what is not, and give their opinion about reality, I'm telling you instinctually speaking, these folks are assuming something like this theory of truth when they talk. In fact, even the postmodern theorists today that want to argue against this idea, they can't even argue. They can't make cases for virtually anything that they would argue without assuming something like this theory truth. So it's so deeply ingrained in our common sense that this has been the preferred view throughout most of the history.
That's been a big one. Let me cover two recent ones though, in postmodern thought. Postmodern thought thinkers have pushed back and rejected, very passionately they've rejected correspondence theories of truth. What a lot of people will say about postmodernism then is that, they don't have theories of truth, they don't believe in truth. That's not technically true. It's certainly true that they don't believe in truth as I just described it or defined it, and they don't believe in truth in the sense that you and I would tend to operate with it. Again, they'll betray that when they start trying to argue for things. But they do have theories of truth, it's just they're very different.
They affirm typically either something like the pragmatic theory of truth or the coherence theory of truth. Pragmatic theory basically says, something is true if it works for you. And so this leads to a kind of relativism, as you can see. So if an idea or a claim or something like that can work for you in some way, then that idea is true for you. So the truth has grounded, not in its correspondence to reality, but rather it's grounded in the working nature of it, the cash value of it. Coherence theory says, now truth is that which coheres with, which means is consistent with other things that we take to be true. So if I say X, and X is somehow incompatible with Y then, X can't be true. But if X it is compatible with Y, the next could be true. And so it's true only on the grounds of the fact that it sticks with others.
I'll push back on those two ideas in these two ways, number one, take coherence. I'm going to argue in just a minute as we look, to try to find the truth, that course that coherence has a place for us in our quest for truth, in some ways. However, coherence can't be the right way of thinking about what truth is itself. Because think about fiction, for example, think about Harry Potter, think about the Berenstain Bears, the stories themselves that are told in these little books, they're completely internally coherent with each other, there's nothing contradictory in the story of Berenstain Bears. But the reality of it is that little bears don't live in trees, they don't ride skateboards and kick soccer balls and break mama's lamp, they just don't do it. And little boys don't fly around on broomsticks in London, and walk through brick walls and stuff. That's just not the way reality works.
So coherence, something may need to be consistent, a system may need to be consistent with itself to be true. But that it's consistent doesn't guarantee that it's true. I'll try to detangle that in a minute, because that's a very subtle, but very important distinction. Pragmatic theory I would argue that, yeah, if the theory is true then it will work, I think that's right. But at the same time, there are some ideas that "work" for people, and yet they're not true. For example, when I was a little boy, I was afraid the boogeyman would get me at night when I slept, and so I slept with a baseball bat. And as long as I had my baseball bat with me, I was confident that the boogeyman wouldn't get me, and I slept like a baby. So the idea worked for me, but the reality of it is, if I were asleep and the boogeyman came in, the baseball bat is not going to protect me from the boogeyman. The boogeyman idea or the baseball bat idea for defense is not a true idea.
I think for those reasons, those ideas in themselves, while they may have something to say to us, they are just not sufficient definitions of what truth is. The best way to think about truth, I contend is still despite protestations by postmodern thinkers, I think the best way to think about truth is, a claim that corresponds with the way the world really actually is. So that brings us to your question, then how we found it. And on, how do we find it? This is where I start with correspondence. I think one of the ways we test truth claims is number one, first and foremost, since we define truth as, that which corresponds reality, well simply put, you test the truth claim. Does it correspond to reality?
If a bold system tells me that the sky is always red, then I know that's false, because in fact, the sky is not always red. If Christianity tried to stick its head in the ground and say that there's no evil in the world, well I think that wouldn't correspond to the way the world really is. And so the first thing we do is, we check to see if it corresponds. Then next, I would say, this is where coherence and pragmatic theory can help us as tests, not definitions, but as tests. I'd say, for example, if Christianity is true, then the various ideas that Christianity teaches have to be internally coherent with each other. So for example, whatever you say about the love of God should be able to be reconciled with and should cohere with the power of God and the holiness of God and the knowledge of God. And in fact problem with evil objections, this is what they're trying to say, they're trying to say that the goodness of God and the power of God are incompatible with the presence of evil in the world.
So a set of claims like a system of belief, like Christianity for it to be true, it has minimally speaking to be coherent, but coherence by itself as I've argued is not enough, you've got to have some other things. But all I'd say, we do have to care about coherence as well. Same thing with pragmatic theory, I think that, at the end of the day if Christianity is true, then it should do exactly what it says it will do, namely redeem us and restore us. And that both is a version of correspondence, but it's also a version of saying, yeah, it works in that way, but again, workability bias itself is not enough. When you add the fact that it works with the fact that it corresponds, now all of a sudden you're starting to get somewhere. I think we can test claims by looking at all three of these things, even if I'm going to use only one of them to define it.
Joe Fontenot: That makes sense. Yeah. So it's sort of a cart before the horse, maybe in some ways where you can't just say, one of these so coherence or something is totally it, but it will help you along the way or can help you along way.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. I'd say this about coherence and pragmatism. I'd say truth is not less than coherence or less than pragmatic, but truth clearly has to be something more than just those two, because those two things by themselves, my Berenstain Bears and boogeyman illustrations seem to indicate that those two things all by themselves are not enough. So minimally speaking, it has to at least be this, but those things by themselves, not enough, there's got to be something else. And that's something else I would say, just is correspondence. Now that we have all three of them, it is all of the above.
Joe Fontenot: That makes sense. This has been helpful. Thanks Jamie.
Jamie Dew: Good, men. Talk to you later.
Joe Fontenot: All right. Hey everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again. If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen the podcasts? That helps other people find it. And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them, just go to Jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way. And we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.