Questioning Faith

Where it’s Okay to Ask

What Is Truth?

By Douglas R. Groothuis

When Pontius Pilate interrogated Jesus before his crucifixion, Jesus proclaimed that "Everyone on the side of truth listens to me" (John 18:37). To this, Pilate replied "What is truth?" and immediately left Jesus to address the Jews who wanted him crucified (v. 38). As Francis Bacon wrote in his essay "On Truth," "'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer." Although we have no record of any reply Jesus gave to Pilate, Christians affirm that Pilate was staring Truth in the face, for Jesus had earlier said to Thomas, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6).

This exchange raises the perennial question of the nature of truth. What does it mean for a statement to be true? This has been a subject of much debate in postmodernist circles, which tend to question established views about truth as objective and knowable. Many even outside of academic discussions may be as cynical about truth as Pilate. "What is truth?" they smirk, without waiting for an answer. But unless we get clear about the notion of truth, any religious claim to truth—Christian or otherwise—will perplex more than enlighten. Before answering questions concerning what claims are true, we need to understand the nature of truth itself.

I will briefly argue for the correspondence view of truth and then pit it against two of its main rivals, cognitive relativism and pragmatism. The correspondence view of truth, held by the vast majority of philosophers and theologians throughout history, claims that any statement is true if and only if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality. The statement "the desk in my study is brown" is true only if there is a brown desk in my study. The statement, "the desk in my study is not brown" is false because it fails to correspond to any objective state of affairs.

This commonsensical view also presupposes a basic law of logic called the law of excluded middle, which stipulates that any unambiguous, declarative statement must be either true or false. It cannot be neither true nor false; nor can it be both true and false.

Strictly speaking, questions, commands, and exclamations are neither true nor false because they do not make claims about objective reality. If I pray, "God, please help me," it is true that I am praying, but I am not affirming that "God will help me" (a declarative statement); I am requesting help. If I say "Study harder!" to my lazy pupil, I am not affirming "You are studying harder" (a declarative statement); I am commanding her diligence. If I exclaim "Yes!" when my pitcher strikes out the cleanup hitter in the bottom of the ninth to win the game, I am not saying, "He struck out the batter" (a declarative statement); I am voicing my approval.

The theological statement "Jesus is Lord" is either true or false. Whether this statement is coolly uttered or exclaimed with great emotion, it has only one value—true or false. It either honors reality or it doesn't. The Christian claims that this truth is true irrespective of anyone's opinion. This is because truth is a quality of statements, not a matter of subjective responses or a majority vote. For example, the statement "The world is spherical" was true even when the vast majority of earthlings took the earth to be flat. The statement "Bill Clinton won the presidential election" was true no matter how much pain it caused George Bush and his supporters.

The correspondence view of truth entails that statements are subject to various kinds of verification and falsification. A statement can be proven false if it can be shown to disagree with objective reality. The photographs from outer space depicting the earth as a blue orb falsified any recalcitrant flat earth theories. Certainly, not all falsification is as straightforward as this, but if statements are true by virtue of their relationship to what they attempt to describe, then statements may be false and shown to be false if they fail to describe reality.

Therefore, Christians—who historically have affirmed (whether implicitly or explicitly) the correspondence view of truth—have argued, for example, that there are good historical reasons to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead in space-time history, thus vindicating his divine authority (see Rom 1:4; 1 Cor 15:1-11). The apostle Paul was also adamant on this: "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead" (1 Cor 15:14-15).

One challenge to the correspondence view is cognitive relativism. Relativism comes in various shapes and sizes, but its salient claim is that truth is relative to persons, not statements. For a statement to be true simply means that a person believes it to be true. Hence the popular refrain, "Well, if that's true for you. . . ." On this view, one person can say "Jesus is Lord" and another can say "Allah is Lord" and both statements can be true, since they accurately express the sentiments of the speakers. This view seems to advance tolerance and civility, but it does so at the expense of logic.

If I say "Jesus is Lord" and you say "Allah is Lord," only one of the two statements can be true because they describe mutually exclusive realities. If "Lord" means a position of unrivaled metaphysical and spiritual supremacy, then Jesus and Allah cannot be both be Lord, because "Jesus" and "Allah" are not two words that mean the same thing. If we mean that I like Jesus and you like Allah, there is no logical contradiction, since subjective states of mind cannot come into logical opposition. However, when we are dealing with divergent claims of truth, contradictions emerge frequently.

When truth depends upon the person holding the belief, anything can become "true," which is absurd. Flat-earthers, geocentrists, and phrenologists have been falsified by the facts. Furthermore, relativism removes any reason, besides sheer whimsy, for changing one's beliefs. If my belief makes something true, there is no objective warrant to alter my beliefs in the face of argument or evidence. Unlike the correspondence view of truth, which seeks objective support for the truth or falsity of statements, for the relativist, there could be no verification or falsification of any belief apart from introspection as to whether or not one holds the belief. Such an attitude applied to medicine or science is deemed ridiculous. Medical doctors have good reason not to bleed their patients, as was commonly done for centuries. Scientists have good reason no longer to believe in the spontaneous generation of insects.

Human subjectivity untethered from objective constraints is a shallow and shabby thing. When it reaches a certain stage we call it stupidity or even insanity.

Worse yet, cognitive relativism is self-refuting; it cuts its own throat. The statement, "Truth is relative to persons and not to statements that agree with objective reality," is a claim about all persons; that is, it is a claim about objective reality. But this is the very thing it cannot be. If truth is only a function of individual preferences, one cannot escape the prison of subjectivity in order to make objective statements that supposedly apply to all of reality. For these reasons, we can safely say that cognitive relativism is false; it does not correspond to reality.

A pragmatic view of truth may be implied in some kinds of cognitive relativism. This states that a belief is true only if it works for a particular person. Therefore, Christianity may be "true for me" if it helps me, but false for another if it doesn't help her. This view confuses usefulness with verity. A simple illustration from Winfried Corduan's Reasonable Faith (pages 60-61) clarifies this. Think of a person who chronically mismanages his money and is very unsuccessful. He comes into a few hundred dollars that are stolen from him without his knowledge. He thinks he has misplaced the money and says to himself, "That's the last straw. I've got to get my life in order!" After this, he becomes successful through hard work and diligence. Yet his belief that he lost the money, however beneficial, is not true because it does not conform to reality. Clearly then, the truthfulness of a belief is different than the usefulness of a belief.

What is truth? Truth is what corresponds to reality. When this is established, we can move on to considering what particular statements are true. Unlike Pilate, we can stay and listen to what Jesus has to say to us.

Further Reading

If you'd like to study this issue further, take a look at one or more of the following books. They each help answer the question of what is truth.

Mortimer Adler, Truth in Religion (Macmillan, 1990).

Winfried Corduan, Reasonable Faith (Broadman, Holman, 1994), especially chapters 1-4.

William Lane Craig, Knowing the Truth About the Resurrection (Servant Publications, 1988).

Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994), chapter 15.

Frederick F. Schmitt, Truth: A Primer (Westview Press, 1995).