Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
What is Truth? Scientific or Religious?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Truth
A Christian wrote to one of the evangelical Aunties:
I was brought up to believe that God made me, but having been taught science at school and college, I can no longer believe it.
The evangelist began his reply saying that the question raised was one of “truth” as the scientist sees it and “truth” according to Christianity. The naïve among us might think that truth is indivisible but the Christians long ago managed to divide it. Kierkegaard, who is too deep for most Christians to read these days, could speak of the “truth that edifies” as being the “truth for me”. Modern day clappies think they have a personal relationship with God. That is the truth for them, for they claim some sort of edification. They do not think they are deluded.
If however, this monkey’s paw is said to animate a mutilated and decayed corpse, is that truth or delusion? If the truth for me is that the communists are the evil empire and should be A-bombed, is that truth or delusion? Perhaps, the truth for me is that it is the Christians who are the evil empire. Is that truth or delusion? Nazis thought Jews were the evil empire and starved millions to death. What is that? “Truth for me” is a delusion—and a dangerous one.
For a scientist, truth is that which conforms with reality, but for a Christian, truth is what they define it as—expressed usually as a creed or less precisely as a belief. It is quite impossible to see any grounds for the confidence with which the Christian will tell us there is life after death—for them, if no others. Yet, it is true! It is Christian truth because they believe it, even though there is no evidence at all for it.
The Christian has been severely embarrassed by the progress made by science, often in discoveries that everyone can freely decide for themselves agree with reality. The media Auntie tells us that “Christian churches have not always faced up to the new truth when they met it.” New truth? The evangelist means scientific truth. The scientist can accept the idea of a “new truth” replacing an “old truth” when science finds conditions within which the “old truth” does not apply. It is the way that science progresses—by testing the bounds of our hypotheses. So, is the evangelist admitting that the “new truth” of science has replaced the “old truth” of Christianity? Not on your life!
Scientifically, there can be multiple truths, but they are carefully confined to particular limits. In one set of conditions, only one truth will be admitted at any one time, but should some new fact be brought to our attention, a better truth might have to be found to replace it. The old truth is not wrong but has defined boundaries. If the “new truth” is that species evolve, as it became after the theory of evolution had been propounded by Darwin, the “old truth” that God created everything in plenum, that is fully, must have been false. Not for Christians! The bishops try their best to keep the truth from general knowledge—or fudge it.
Two church wives were discussing Darwin’s discoveries, alerted to them by the Bishop of Oxford.
He says we are descended from monkeys.
How dreadful. Wilberforce says it is not so. We must pray he is correct.
Quite so. And, if it is so, that, God willing, it shall not become widely known.
Creationists have not progressed beyond this. They think that the normal progress of science, through skepticism, controversy and comparison with nature, implies that scientists know nothing, or cannot agree on it. Christians can! God knows these things and has put it all down in the bible. Theologians quickly saw that this was a shaky basis to stand on, but Fundamentalists have no such problems. They define truth as being what the bible says, and anything different is the devil at work.
Their extreme stance is conditioned by the retreat forced upon biblical truth as science falsifies it. What is left is a “God of the Gaps” and the gaps keep closing. By defining the bible as truth and science as Satanic, Fundamentalists try to avoid this bind. Christians must accept a once and for all truth even though it does not agree with reality, or put up with a “God of the Gaps”.
“Christians need have no fear of the search for truth,” the evangelist proclaims, even though he has given any intelligent ones among them extremely good reasons for fearing either it, or the truth of their beliefs. The reason he says it with such confidence is that modern Christians are absolutely sure that they can make any scientific truth fit the Christian straitjacket. The central reason is that they know their flocks will believe anything they are told. God will commandeer the “new truths” and disregard the porky pies he has been telling us for centuries. He has been found out, but quite unfazed, declares it an “old truth” and claims the “new truth”. The “old truth” was not false, it was just suitable for simple people, you see!
Thus evolution is God’s tree of life, beginning in a primordial act of creation which expands into trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit. The evangelists, amazed at their God-sent ingenuity, wonder in awe at the grandeur of it all which “quite takes your breath away and strengthens the Christian faith.” The scientist shows that species were not individually made by God as Christians had maintained for millennia and, in a twinkling, it proves the might of God! His old lies are forgiven. What, though, of the bible that increasingly gets fuller and fuller of old discarded truths? It is a poetic, metaphorical, allegorical and even mythical way of expressing Christian truth.
This has gotten so far that theologians are now beginning to tell us that the bible is not true in the sense of being historical. It is now sacred literature. Literature, of course, cannot be false, so the Christians move onto safer territory. Or is it? If the bible is not historically true, then why should anyone believe it. Sacred literature can be anything. Hesiod and Homer were sacred to the Greeks, so why shouldn’t we accept those as sacred literature? Nearly all mythology was sacred literature to somebody, but now we regard it as fairy tales. The literature of the bible is no different.
