Puzzle Piece 2: The Truth - who cares?

TFY’d: The Truth – Should we care?

“Hey Dave!” called Jonnie. “How’s it goin?”
“Not so loud!” whimpered Dave.
“What’s wrong?” asked Jonnie.
“Killer hangover from that pub crawl last night,” whispered Dave.
“I told you not to go,” Jonnie replied. “There’s a reason God doesn’t want us drinking till we spew!”
“Dude, I really don’t care about what God does or doesn’t want us to do!” Dave snapped. “He probably doesn’t even exist, anyway.”
“But what if you’re wrong? What if God does exist? What if you live your life doing anything you want, and when you die find yourself before God? You’ll have lost everything...an eternity in a place you really don’t wanna be!”
Dave thought about that for a while before saying, “What if you’re wrong? You will’ve spent your whole life trying to do what a non-existent God wants you to do!”
“So what?” Jonnie said. “What will I have missed out on? Hangovers and STDs? Sounds to me like you’ve got a lot more to lose than I do!”

(For another great example of why we should care check out the short vid Cruel Logic on YouTube. Be warned - it's pretty dark!)


Puzzle Piece 2: So Truth Exists – who cares?

We’ve seen that the idea that there are no truths is hopelessly self-refuting and contradictory. We’ve already figured out that truth is objective and absolute, and that commands to ‘tolerate’ other’s views are themselves intolerant. But does this really matter? I mean, who really cares, right?

We live in an age and culture that is characterised by apathy and ambivalence. Try to talk to someone about these issues and you’re likely to get this response: “I don’t care!” Many of us are ignorant and apathetic when it comes to matters of truth. Not all truth, mind you, just religious or moral truth. We care passionately about truth when it comes to medicine, or our money, or the lies told by politicians. Just not moral truths.

Are the people who promote a lack of interest and concern about moral and religious truth right, or do these truths really matter?

They really matter. How do we know? Firstly, people live their lives as though truths about morality are important, despite what they say. As soon as someone treats them immorally they are quick to point out that they’ve been wronged. Just lie to someone, or take their money, and you’ll quickly see how true this is. Morality is the foundation for pretty much everything we do and affects all aspects of our lives: finances, society, spirituality and (sometimes) our physical well being.

Secondly, success in life often depends on the moral choices we make. Choices about sex, marriage, drugs, business – make the wrong moral decision and you could end up in ruin, but the right choice might bring you success and happiness. We’ve all heard the stories of reformed drug addicts, showing us the dangers that lie along a path like that. We see stories on the news about high profile celebrities like Tiger Woods falling from grace because of the poor moral choices they’ve made. Morality has a way of biting those who try to ignore it.

Finally, our society is governed by institutionalised morality –a.k.a. laws. Each law the government passes says that one set of behaviour is right and another is wrong – that’s morality! The question is, whose morals are the ones being enforced by society? Some issues are trivial, like do we drive on the left-hand side of the road or the right? But what about the big questions like abortion or euthanasia? Whose moral ideas are the ones that get turned into laws on these issues? If it’s morally wrong to take the life of an innocent human being, shouldn’t that moral truth be put into law? Whose morality gets to decide on the important areas of your life, like your health or finances?

What we believe about moral truths deeply affects the lives of our society. In 1850s America, in the case of Dred Scott, the US Supreme Court decided that African-Americans were property, not people. Did that decision matter? Did it matter that the Nazi’s thought the Jews were inferior and could (indeed should) be wiped out? Truth in morality matters!

But what about truth in religion? Is that important, too? It could be even more important than truth in morality! If the Bible is true, then all those who have decided not to follow its teachings have chosen a rather nasty eternal consequence. French mathematical genius Blaise Pascal (1623-62) thought about it this way: you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose by believing in God. If you’re right, you get to heaven. If you’re wrong, and God doesn’t exist, you’ve lost nothing. On the other hand, if you don’t believe and you’re right, you’ve gained nothing. But if you don’t believe and you’re wrong, you lose everything! This has come to be known as Pascal’s Wager, and it’s worth thinking seriously about.

It’s just as important if some religion other than Christianity is true. After all, if the Koran is true then Christians are in serious eternal trouble. On the other hand, if the atheists are right then there are no eternal consequences for anything we do and this life is all there is, so we might as well do whatever we want – cheat, lie, take anything you like. It doesn’t matter.

But let’s forget about eternity for a moment, and look at the importance of religious truths in the here-and-now. Millions of people in India who are poor and suffering are ignored by many Hindu’s because of their belief in the religious teaching of karma – those people must have done something bad in a past life and are now paying the price, so we’d better not interfere. Inject Mother Theresa and the Christian belief that the poor and needy should be helped and we can change the lives of millions. Does the religious teaching of karma matter? It does to those who are suffering!

Hopefully by now you’ve realised that religious and moral truths are important, that they affect not just our eternal destiny but also the way we live our lives. What’s the next step? Next is to learn how to determine if a truth claim is actually true or not, and to do that we need to look at two of the foundational laws of logic: the Law of Noncontradiction and the Law of the Excluded Middle.


The Law of Noncontradiction

The Law of Noncontradiction says that contradictory claims cannot both be true, i.e. the opposite of true is false. We all grasp this principle instinctively, without really thinking about it, and we use it every day. Say, for example, that you run into some friends of yours, a married couple, and you say to the wife “Is it true that you’re having a baby?” If she says “yes” and he says “no” you don’t carry on thinking “That was really helpful. I know exactly what’s going on now!” No, you think to yourself, “Maybe she hasn’t told him, or perhaps they didn’t understand the question.” The thing you know for sure is that they can’t both be right! That’s the Law of Noncontradiction.

Apply this Law to the question of God. Either God exists, or God does not exist. Both can’t be true at the same time. In the same way, the Biblical claim that Jesus died and rose from the dead and the Koran’s claim that Jesus didn’t cannot both be true – one is right and the other is wrong.

As obvious as this sounds, there are people who deny this Law. How do we respond to these people? Avicenna, a Muslim philosopher from the medieval period, proposed an interesting solution. He said that anyone who denies this law should be beaten until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as to not be beaten!


The Law of the Excluded Middle

The Law of the Excluded Middle tells us that a thing either is, or is not. God either exists, or He does not. Jesus either rose from the dead or He did not. There is no third alternative, no middle option.

These two Laws are the first principles of truth, the tools we use to discover all other truths. But these laws alone are not enough. They form the basis of our knowledge about truth, but they don’t necessarily tell us what is actually true. Let’s look at a classic logical argument as an example:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Jonnie is a man.
3. Therefore, Jonnie is mortal.

This argument follows the laws of logic – it is logically valid. That means that the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises: if all men are mortal, and if Jonnie is a man, then Jonnie is mortal. But that’s only half the job. Just because something is logically valid doesn’t make it true. Let’s look at another example:
1. All men are four-legged reptiles.
2. Dave is a man.
3. Therefore, Dave is a four-legged reptile.

This argument is just as logically valid as the first example, but it’s not true, because the premises don’t match reality. So how do we know what’s true?

We know by making observations of the world around us. When we drop a ball we observe that it falls to the ground. When we do this enough we realise that there is some principle at work that we call gravity. Much of what we know we learn in this way. In fact, you’ve already used it. When you read about Dave above you realised that all men you’ve observed are actually two-legged mammals, not four-legged reptiles, so you know that premise to be false. Conclusions based on this type of reasoning (called induction) cannot be considered absolutely certain, only highly probable. After all, can you be 100% certain that all objects fall? No, because you haven’t seen all objects being dropped. You have, however, observed that every object that you’ve seen dropped has fallen, and can therefore be 99-plus percent certain that all objects fall when dropped. Not beyond any doubt, true, but beyond any reasonable doubt.


But I Can’t Observe God!

When it comes to truths about God, we can’t observe Him so how can we use this process to discover things about Him? In the same way that we don’t observe gravity, we observe the effects of gravity, we can observe the effects of God. The page you’re reading is a great example of this type of reasoning. Why do you assume that this page had an author? Because your observational experiences have shown you that every book or webpage you have ever read has an author. You’ve never seen any natural process like wind or rain produce a book, only people. So even though you didn’t see anyone write this, you’re justified in concluding that it has an author.

In this same way we can conclude truths about God. Just ask yourself, have I ever seen any effects that would require a pre-existing supernatural being as their cause? The answer is yes, and we’ll look at one next – the universe itself!



Prepared by D England using material from Chapter 2 of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Geisler and Turek, unless otherwise cited. Translated for Youth by J Simmons.