What is truth, and what happens if society rejects that it even exists?

The existence of truth is foundational to Christian belief. Not only in the truth of doctrine, and of the history and life of Jesus, but also in the importance of being honest and guarding against hypocrisy and lies.

Yet like the faith itself, many people today question the notion of truth. The modern world is so suspicious of this concept that a word was created in 1992 to describe this new reality – “post-truth”, as discussed by Kristi Mair, a lecturer at Oak Hill Seminary, and Dr Shaun Stevenson, a lecturer in philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, in a recent Premier Unbelievable discussion.

It is relevant to the debate that Mair has a Christian faith, but Dr Stevenson has rejected his former Christian beliefs. He no longer believes in the existence of any objective truth, as it is “dangerous because it has too much power” and therefore cannot be challenged, he says. The philosopher believes that we invented the idea of truth to make us feel better, and offers a truly atheistic vision instead: “There’s nothing good or evil in the world itself, it’s as simple as that. The world just is all of this stuff, it’s kind of fabricated constructions by us again because… that’s what gives coherence and meaning and safety.”

Mair looks to more practical explanations, and argues that the reason that “post-truth” became “word of the year” in 2016 is that technological advances have made us more suspicious about the information we are receiving. “Facts no longer persuade in the public arena of ideas and conversation,” she said. “Instead it’s about personal feelings, that help us to understand what what is true. So rather than thinking about facts as persuasive, instead it’s a focus on ‘truthiness’… you hear lots of phrases like ‘this is true for me but it might not be true for you’ or ‘here’s my truth.’”

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If there are objective truths or an objective good and evil, why is it not obvious to everyone – for example, some people think the war in Ukraine is good, and others do not?

Mair argues that while human beings can get it wrong, and in fact can never be certain that they personally have the truth – even applying that principle to her own Christian faith - “that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that there are good reasons to know that things are true.”

Mair challenges Dr Stevenson’s subjective belief that “truths” are just opinions determined by the choices of a community. If that was the case, she argues, what about the history of minorities who have challenged the injustices of majorities? “If morality is on the basis of a collectivist view of a group consensus working out the framework… what does that mean for people like Rosa Parks who who stands up on a bus and says ‘no I’m not going to go along with this any more’ and actually changes through that one action the trajectory of history?”

If there is no “truth” but just ideas that communities construct to serve themselves, as Dr Stevenson has argued, what does that mean for very immoral societies? As the apologist William Lane Craig has mused in his explanations of the “moral argument for God’s existence”, if all the world was taken over by Nazis, would that mean that Nazis were correct or moral? Most answer ‘no’ – so they believe that there is something independent of human minds that grounds truth and morals – that they are objective, and that they really do exist. Craig argues that the best explanation for this is God.

Yet Dr Stevenson uses the case of Nazi Germany, most people’s ultimate example of an immoral society, to justify his own argument. They believed the Aryan race was superior and that they should spread that belief.

Most people know that this belief was in fact a terrible lie. However, Dr Stevenson claims, their belief that they did have the “truth” is what led to their evils and falsehoods being imposed on other people.

Dr Stevenson believes that Christianity is an example of this, claiming that it introduced ideas that were worse for women than Old Testament beliefs, for example no longer allowing divorce for women, prohibiting speaking in church, or mandating head coverings.

Mair however argues that the New Testament teachings were liberating for women. As Amy Orr Ewing explains in this Unbelievable clip, when properly understood, the entire Bible teaches the truth that women’s lives have value and dignity.

So Mair says that it is not the belief in “truth” that is the problem in Dr Stevenson’s examples, but human beings and their tendency to get things wrong. “It is possible to use truths against people, and sadly history in some ways has borne that out, but that doesn’t mean that that truth in of itself is bigoted, it’s the people who have communicated that in particular ways.”

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What is truth?

Rather than thinking about “truth” in an abstract, academic way, Mair argues for a more personal understanding in Christian belief. She refers to medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, who said that through his life, Jesus demonstrates the way of Truth in rejecting hatred and loving others. “It’s not a ‘here’s an external truth thing which is being pronounced over me which now in some way restricts me in my freedom’, it’s actually a call to follow Jesus along the way of Truth so that we become more free…

“If everyone lived as though… Jesus actually means it when he says that he’s the way the truth and the life, then I think society would be completely revolutionized.”

Another Christian who defines truth through the person of Jesus is Mack Stiles in another recent Unbelievable discussion on the topic “What is truth?”. “I would say Jesus sets a definition of truth,” says Stiles, a missionary and writer of the book “The truth about lies”. “He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me… that’s what I think is truth. Jesus said it and that’s what I stake my life on.”

But his opponent, the former Christian and now famous atheist Dan Barker, firmly rejected this definition. Good people can not believe in God, bad people can believe in Christian ideas, and Christians appear to disagree about basic moral truths, he says. It seems our inability to define “truth” or be certain what they are gives ammunition to his atheist cause.

Virtue and living out the truth

Mair is in favour of ‘virtue ethics’, an approach had been less favoured by many evangelicals due to a concern that it sounds like ‘working for salvation’, but has become more in vogue since a series of scandals. Virtue is to practice living out Christian truth and especially morals in our daily lives. She says to be “mindful of how we’re actually behaving and interacting with one another… that’s really important if objective truth does exist”.

One evangelical who encourages us to think about cultivating virtue in practice as well as grounding it in God is pastor and author Dominic Done. In his debate on how to develop virtue with atheist Julian Baggini on Unbelievable, he said: “caring for our soul takes time and mentorship under Jesus is a lifelong marathon towards health, it’s not an instantaneous to show up and expect to win sprint.”

While some Christians might be accused of not developing virtue and not following the path of their Lord, one of the biggest problems for an atheistic, post-truth worldview is its most obvious contradiction. It’s often pointed out that the relativist claim that “objective truth does not exist” contradicts itself – because it is itself a claim of objective truth. How does Dr Stevenson justify this? “I think that that’s because of the kind of chains of representation that are wrapped around that discussion. The fact that these things happen demonstrates that they are internal structures that we’re using to try and make sense and that invites the opportunity for nonsensical things … this it is going on in our heads because in the world you know, the world is a vast irrational, there is no truth there is no sense in the world it’s just all a projection of us on it.”

Is this nihilism the real foundation of the modern attitude of “it’s true for you, but not for me,” rather than the tolerance and pluralism that it appears to support? If we believe that are no truths to be found or held on to, what effect does holding such beliefs have on a soul, on a community, and a nation? As CS Lewis argued – Truth really does matter.

Heather Tomlinson is a freelance Christian writer. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com/ or via X (twitter) @heathertomli