“There is no such thing as personal truth or subjective truth and the fact that religion shamelessly encourages such way of thinking is not helping its case.” – blogger Michel Mercier, www.weareallatheists.com
My atheist friend offers a mouthful above.
The ancient philosophers used to kick around a question that, in my opinion, still merits periodic consideration. The notion related to the nature of a newborn infant in terms of his or her cognitive orientation.
At the risk of being simplistic, the debate went something like this: does a newborn human come into the world “tabula rasa” (= a blank slate) with respect to cognitive orientation? Or, is an infant already predisposed to certain presuppositions, behaviours, assumptions, ways of thinking, etc., by virtue of, at minimum, the genetic realities it has inherited from its human parents?
Should one take even a few minutes to consider such a question, it readily becomes apparent that any attempt to find common ground regarding the nature of truth is a pursuit fraught with a significant number of challenges. To put it one way, we might say that by the time a child is old enough to consider whether or not what has been presented to them as truth by their early influencers actually constitutes truth or not, they will have already established some very significant presuppositions about the nature of life, truth, reality, etc. and the factors involved in drawing conclusions on such.
Given this reality, I’m a little hesitant to affirm Mercier’s premise above that “there is no such thing as personal truth or subjective truth.”
To be sure, there is a sense in which I entirely agree with him: a fire hydrant cannot simultaneously be fire-engine red and fire-engine lime green.
It is either one or the other and a few minutes of interaction with the empirical data in that regard soon settles that question.
However, if all the fire hydrants in Montreal where Mercier lives are only and ever red, he is not justified in concluding that, accordingly, all fire hydrants throughout the known world are similarly red.
To argue that what is personal truth for him in that regard must therefore be personal truth in all places is an example of the very thing he maligns in the quote above.
Put another way, by the time we human beings are old enough to even begin examining some of the historically profound questions regarding the meaning or purpose of life, most of us – whether we are aware of it or not - have already purchased stock in some school of thought related to how and what we consider truth to be or the means we accept as legitimate in attempting to arrive at any conclusions in that regard.
The point is, I’m not convinced mankind’s search for truth in the metaphysical realm can ever be as objective a pursuit as my friend believes it to be.
Besides, is my openness to a world view that allows for a divine power necessarily any worse than a world view that is unfriendly to such? Who says? And why?
There may well be many factors that contribute to a conclusion regarding what constitutes metaphysical truth or not than merely that which can be submitted for traditional scientific verification.
Tim Callaway is pastor of Faith Community Baptist Church in Airdrie.
