Truth

 

I appreciate this Wikipedia summary:

Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences. True statements are usually held to be the opposite of false statements. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, law, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion, including journalism and everyday life. 

Sources of Information

In complex, modern societies, the relationship between reality and our representations of reality—between what Lippmann called the “real environment” and the “pseudo-environments” that make up our mental models of the real environment—is heavily mediated by complex chains of trust, testimony, and interpretation.

                                                    -Dan Williams, 2024

                                                                   Why do people believe true things?

Nothing

Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing.

                                                                              -Phillip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks

The Search

On the one hand, the accumulated writings of the greatest minds of the last three thousand years is available for the first time to anyone with a smart phone. However, due to the massive mound of such writing and the work it takes to sort through, most are as unlikely to dig in as if there were still old walls of language, space, time, and the like to limit us.

On the other hand, this has not stopped the world’s billions from dropping in their own universal approach to truth for everyone to see in the form of the latest attention-getting cat video.

And so, in the modern world, meaning is so much more commonly sought in cat videos than in researching the sages.

Us

The sort of cheerful nihilism so dominant in post-modernism could only take root in the flabby, comfortable West, where one can play around with everything, including God, justice, marriage, society, truth, and so on, without having to worry about the consequences.

                                                                  -Bartholomew and Goheen, Christian Philosophy

Difficult to Locate

A purely secularist, opposed-to-all-religion position takes it to have been established that all religious doctrines yet offered have been shown to be false, and it is quite willing to infer that any doctrinal replacements will suffer a similar fate. Since the great work in which it was shown that all religious doctrines are false is uncommonly hard to locate—it is hard to think of any barely plausible candidates—pure secularism possesses an unfounded optimism about its status and prospects.

                                                                                           -Keith Yandell, Religious Experience

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Messy

Some quotes from the book:

People who are desperate for spirituality very seldom worry about the mess they make on their way to be with Jesus.
Messy Spirituality is the scandalous assertion that following Christ is anything but tidy and neat, balanced and orderly. Far from it. Spirituality is complex, complicated, and perplexing—the disorderly, sloppy, chaotic look of authentic faith in the real world.

Life with Jesus is meant to be lived, not smothered, dissected, inspected, or condemned.

Followers of Christ are odd. Oddness is important because it is the quality that adds color, texture, variety, beauty to the human condition. Christ doesn't make us the same. What he does is affirm our differentness. Oddness is important because the most dangerous world in Western culture is sameness. Sameness is a virus that infects members of industrialized nations and causes an allergic reaction to anyone who is different. This virus affects the decision-making part of our brains, resulting in an obsession with making the identical choices everyone else is making.

Sameness is a disease with disastrous consequences.---differences are ignored, uniqueness is not listened to, our gifts are cancelled out. Life, passion, and joy are snuffed out. Sameness is the result of sin and does much more than infect us with lust and greed; it flattens the human race, franchises us, attempts to make us all homogenous. Sameness is the cemetery where our distinctiveness is buried. In a sea of sameness, no one has an identity. But Christians do have an identity. We're aliens! We are the odd ones, the strange ones, the misfits, the outsiders, the incompatibles. Oddness is a gift from God and sits dormant until God's Spirit gives it life and shape.

Spiritual growth is more than a procedure; it's a wild search for God in the tangled jungle of our souls, a search which involves a volatile mix of messy reality, wild freedom, frustrating stuckness, in creasing slowness, and a healthy dose of gratitude.

                                                                                 -Michael Yaconelli

Measureless

 

To say that God is infinite is to say that he is measureless.  Measurement is the way created things have of accounting for themselves. It describes limitations, imperfections, and cannot apply to God. Weight describes the gravitational pull of the earth upon material bodies; distance describes intervals between bodies in space; length means extension in space, and there are other familiar measurements such as those for liquid, energy, sound, light, and numbers for pluralities. We also try to measure abstract qualities, and speak of great or little faith, high or low intelligence, large or meager talents.

Is it not plain that all this does not and cannot apply to God? It is the way we see the works of his hands, but not the way we see him. He is above all this, outside of it, beyond it. Our concepts of measurement embrace mountains and men, atoms and stars, gravity, energy, numbers, speed, but never God. We cannot speak of measure or amount or size or weight and at the same time be speaking of God, for these tell of degrees and there are no degrees in God. All that he is he is without growth or addition or development. Nothing in God is less or more, or large or small. He is what he is in himself, without qualifying thought or word. He is simply God.

                                                                                  -A W Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Everywhere and Nowhere

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself.  The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which thy can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. To admit that there is one who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while he is nowhere, for "where" has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds his hands have made.
                                                      -A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Darings

Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it.

                                                                                     -Augustine (City of God)

The Sky

There was a time when men marveled at the stars.  Now, however, we do not bother to even look at them.  Knowing what they did not:  that they are larger, more varied, and farther away than they could even conceive, we would rather stare instead at what we know to be a cheap imitation of reality: an image made of light and shadows on a screen.