What s Truth?uth?
What is T i S
BILL MCKAY Moderator
cripture records that Pontius Pilate famously asked the ultimate question that has
continually baffled mankind for centuries, “What is truth?”. This is a question that man has constant- ly searched for an answer to and has failed.
Unfortunately, man has approached this attempt of an answer mostly from an esoteric and philosophical perspective that allows no “true” answer, as any response from any of those viewpoints are based purely on relational and relativistic perspectives.
For example, I had an opportunity a number of years ago to speak with a young man in his early 20s about his beliefs. I asked him to share his thoughts about God, the Bible, Jesus, man, life, and death. In our discussions, he shared that he believed in a god of some kind (small “g” – a superior being) who was powerful but not all-powerful. He did not believe in Hell but that there was a heaven of some kind. He believed the Bible was a “good book” with good advice to follow but was mostly just stories. He believed that Jesus was a wise and good man whom we could look to for inspiration on how we should live our lives. He believed that man was a creature of evolution from apes and that with our evolution and subsequent superior intelligence, man has developed a system of morality that raised us above the other creatures of the earth. He believed that we were supposed to live as well and morally as possible and that when we died, we would be judged as to how well we had lived in a - nated to do it all over again until we succeeded.
When I asked him who would judge our lives and on what ba- sis would we be judged, he had no answer. I then asked him why he believed all of these things, and where his belief system came from. He shared that he had gone to Sun- day School as a child and heard the stories of God, the Bible, and Jesus. Over his teenage years, he fell away from the church and started search- ing for different possible answers to his questions. He developed his system of beliefs based on the con- cept that our beliefs are based on our experiences and what feels right for us - relativism. I asked him what the basis for his concept of truth for everything he believed was. Did he believe that anything could be ab- solutely true? He professed that he did not believe that anything could be absolutely true. It was true to him if it felt right, and what was true for him may not necessarily be true for me as it was all relative to each per- son’s experience. I then asked him to keep that in mind as we discussed these things.
I asked him what 2+2 equaled. He said 4. I replied no, it was 5. He said it was 4. I repeated no again; the an- swer was 5. He asked me how I could legitimately say that, what was my basis for saying that? I reminded him of his immediate previous an- swer to my question about truth and responded that it felt right to me and that maybe tomorrow it might be 6 depending on how I felt then. Looking very puzzled, I asked him to try to explain his answer of 2+2=4 to me using some type of based on how the counting system we use, 2+2=4. I said that based on his use of the universally accepted concept of mathematics and logic, I could accept his answer. I then went
4 The Associate Reformed Presbyterian
Moderator’s Challenge
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