The Nature of Truth

the Knight and friends dance into death and eternity in Bergman's
greatest film,The Seventh Seal 

A poster on Cadre blog says that Christianity screwed up truth and spoiled the rich ancient heritage in modernity, as though Christianity is the historical newcomer and modernity has an ancient heritage,

Paplinton:
The word 'truth' and its underlying concept has been so wantonly cheapened over the centuries by the christian experience as to render it meaningless. The only thing we can say is certain about religion, christianity being no exception, is as Prof David Eller, renowned anthropologist eruditely explains, "Religion is essentially social, in both senses of the word. It is an activity that humans do together; it is created, maintained, and perpetuated by human group behaviour. It is also social in the sense that it extends that sociality beyond the human world, to a (putative) realm of non-human agents who also interact with us socially." Any every religion exhibits the very same pathologies based on superstition and ignorance of how the mind works. Its been a tough nut to crack but thankfully science is slowly but inexorably shining a light into those shadowed recesses.So the question about the "Trooth™" of christianity as the 'one and only true religion', or any of the thousands of extinct and extant religions that make the identical claim, is simply enculturated mumbo-jumbo.[1]

He not only spells truth differently but gives it a registered trade mark; nothing could be more appropriate because the modern denuded concept of truth replacing the real idea of truth is a product of 1DM [2] and thus the simulacra  truth of the closed realm of discourse (the product of regicide everything to consuming and producing). In his mind he thinks the issue is between fact based empirical science and pretend made up unreliability Christianity, he;s a dupe. He;s duped into  that false dichotomy. The scientific model that seems so factual is not factual at all it's the streaming data. The data stream is relative and vanishing based upon  the constantly shifting sands of surface level things. The mere existence of the physical is the end of the line for the stream of  data. There can be no unseen  reality there. Of course there is one, the subatomic level but that;s just part of the inconsistency of ideology. That unseen reality plays a crucial role in scientific theory so it;s necessary but spirit doesn't so it has go.

The Christian ideal of truth is not made up.It's the concept of unseen reality that forms the basis of reality (like the subatomic level). It is unchaining,timeless, the basis of all that is. That is the description of god, In St. Augustine's view God = truth.

 Augustine, after he had experienced all the implications of ancient skepticism, gave a classical answer to the problem of the two absolutes: they coincide in the nature of truth. Veritas is presupposed in ever philosophical argument; and veritas is God. You cannot deny truth as such because you could do it only in the name of truth, thus establishing truth. And if you establish truth you affirm God. “Where I have found the truth there I have found my God, the truth itself,” Augustine says. The question of the two Ultimates is solved in such a way that the religious Ultimate is presupposed in every philosophical question, including the question of God. God is the presupposition of the question of God. This is the ontological solution of the problem of the philosophy of religion. God can never be reached if he is the object of a question and not its basis.[3]

In the ideology of scientism God must necessarily be seen as "made up"and any unseen  realm not subatomic has to be made up because if surface level of relativity is all there is then there can be no unseen. So the data stream version of truth is based upon ideology of scientism, at least the science oriented version of it is.I still see it as a creature of post human era (circa 1980) and thus akin to 'Trumpism and alt truth. So even tough fundamentalism calls itself "Christian" it has forsaken the Christian conception truth and is really just another product of the same forces that produced new atheism.

Lest there be any doubt that Paplinton is in the scientism way look at his answer to my comment:
"The overwhelming evidence suggests an explanation for why christianity [and all religions for that matter] persists is not that its narrative is true per se but that it is an epiphenomenal by-product of our need to make sense of the genetic and evolutionary drivers for human behavior in the absence of modern scientific knowledge and understanding two thousand years ago that we now are so thankfully privy to." So he has to destroy the concept of truth,make sure is no concept of a grander context in which material reality plays out amid unchanging eternal  verities,it has to be relative and made up. It's just epi-phenomenal not even a real phenomenon. It;s based upon the need to explaimn things,which is the only motive for any belief if scientism is your only mode of thought. Because it emulates  science.

His sense of history is totally distorted, The Christian concept is closer to teh Greek, having borrowed from it. The modern scientism view narrowed from the Christian. Physicist Paul Davies recognizes that modern enlightenment conceits of laws of physics are merely the residue of the God concept with the personality taken out, French philosphes just retained the powers of God with no will to motivate them.[4] The meta-narrative of scinentisms's ideology would have us believe that only Christianity is an attempt to understand and make sense but the empirical data stream of science is facts and the truth and the true explanation. In reality it is it just another meta-narrative with a different rational but still one that attempts to understand what is beyond its understanding.

Notice he has the social scientist pronounce religion just a social institution. Like that proves that's all it is. But the social sciences (founded largely by Auguste Comte) working out of the early dialectical materialist circles of  Saimt-Simon, Fuerbach, and Marx were set in the path of atheist critique from the beginning,

Classical sociological theories are theories of great scope and ambition that either were created in Europe between the early 1800s and the early 1900s or have their roots in the culture of that period. The work of such classical sociological theorists as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Vilfredo Pareto was important in its time and played a central role in the subsequent development of sociology. Additionally, the ideas of these theorists continue to be relevant to sociological theory today, because contemporary sociologists read them. They have become classics because they have a wide range of application and deal with centrally important social issues. [5]

Many of those thinkers made a big thing of atheism. I was a sociology major,l competed the whole major, my BA is in sinology and communication. I got out of the field because its disregard of any view other than its grinding number crunching reductionist meta-narrative.




Data stream




Most modern Theologians base their view of truth upon the correspondence theory, true of Tillich in particular.

 [The idea]... that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). This basic idea has been expressed in many ways, giving rise to an extended family of theories and, more often, theory sketches. Members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, conditions, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences.

The correspondence theory of truth is often associated with metaphysical realism. Its traditional competitors, pragmatist, as well as coherentist, verificationist, and other epistemic theories of truth, are often associated with idealism, anti-realism, or relativism. In recent years, these traditional competitors have been virtually replaced (at least from publication-space) by deflationary theories of truth and, to a lesser extent, by the identity theory (note that these new competitors are typically notassociated  with anti-realism). [6]

So my notion of truth understands the data stream of science in terms of understanding the physical world but it cant communicate any reality beyond the surface which is empirical existence. Truth with a capital "T" i that which is and it includes  eternal necessary being that can neither cease nor fail to be.It is beyond our understanding.

I close with an explanation of my graphic, Why do I use a scene from the Seventh Seal? BTW the mast head photo is also from the same film, the knight plays chess with death, After doing so he finally looses and he and his friends dance off into death symbolic of dying of black pleasure. Art beats science it's the perfect medium to transmit religious tough into the modern world. It's "made up" but not false.It's the symbol of a truth beyond our understanding that has to be mediated through metaphor, science is made  phony when scientism pretends it can go beyond itself and explain the transcendent, that really means explicate it away.

we all play chess with death, we are all going to die,we do not know what's over the hill.But we know there is truth over the hill.

Sources 


[1] Paplinton, "If Christianity were True Would You Become a Christian?" Comment section, Cadre Comments.(April 22) 2017 blog. URL"
http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2017/04/if-christianity-were-true-would-you.html?showComment=1493165487346#c247906903880029801
(accessed April 26,2017)

[2] 1DM is "one-Dimensional Man" Herbert Marcue's concept marking the decline of Western civilization and the ultimate triumph of capitalistic market forces in producing a tantalized system of obedience. It was the ultimate in capitalism  induced false consciousness arresting class struggle. The workers get hooked on false needs, they don't perceive their need to rebel

see Marcuse: Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, 12.

[3] Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, New York: Oxford University press,1964 12-13.

[4] Paul Davies, “Physics and The Mind of God: the Templeton Prize Address,” First Things, August 1995, on line version URL:https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/08/003-physics-and-the-mind-of-god-the-templeton-prize-address-24 accessed Nov 25, 2016

[5] Paul Rtzer and Douglas J.Goodman, Classical Sociological Theory, New York: McGraw Hill 4th edition, 79.

[6] Marian David,, "The Correspondence Theory of Truth", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/truth-correspondence/>.
First published Fri May 10, 2002; substantive revision Thu May 28, 2015