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Introduction
(This original article on this page has now been updated and renamed as 'Six Key Questions'.)
The title of this page is potentially misleading. If you search the Internet, you can find many pages and whole sites devoted to the search for truth, and many people claiming that the have found the truth - perhaps in Jesus Christ, perhaps in some form of esoteric meditation, perhaps in the teachings of a strangely-neglected spiritual master, or one of the many alternatives. What almost all of these people have in common is a simple two-fold claim: "I have found the truth," and "You can find it too."
Truth and The Truth
The first point to note is that many of these people talk about their 'search for truth' and how they have found 'the truth'. 'Truth' is a tricky concept which philosophers have struggled with for millennia (see Three Kinds of Knowledge), but there is a big difference between 'truth' and 'the truth'. Without a specific context (such as looking for the truth about this crime), 'the truth' becomes a cosmic revelation, parodied in Douglas Adams' work as "the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything."
You can search for the truth about a specific puzzle, and you can sometimes discover the truth - this is essentially what pretty much every detective novel is about: at the end, the hero uncovers the truth, and justice is, more or less, satisfied. This works in fiction; in the real world, you can always discover more: you want to know not only what happened, but also why? And the 'why' question never ends - this person was influenced by that person and this event, and these other people and events were also shaped by other influences and forces. To understand any one thing perfectly requires understanding everything. You can never find the answer, not the full answer; but you can find enough of the answer to satisfy you, to meet your need at this point in time. You can find enough of the answer to enable you to let go of the question.
So you can search for the truth concerning some specific thing, but you can never - in any absolute sense - find it. But you can, perhaps, find enough of the truth to satisfy your need - which is all you require. And it seems improbable that you, or anyone, can fully grasp 'the truth', even if that is a thing which could be found.
The truth you have found is always partial - it can never be the whole truth. But you can hope that it is close enough to the whole truth, for your purposes.
Provisional Truth
The second point follows on from the first. Whatever truth you find, there is always more to find - and this is true for all three kinds of truth. Every scientific discovery raises more questions, everything we discover about people and society raises more questions, and everything we discover about meaning and purpose and morality raises more questions. This is a fairly obvious observation.
But the point is that the new truth we discover can change how we understand the things we thought we previously knew and understood. Many detective stories use this: we discover the truth we were looking for - who killed the victim - and then we are faced with the question of why did they do it? A crime that we thought was about money turns out to be about revenge, or jealousy, or love. Or perhaps, at school, you are taught about electrical circuits, and then discovered that electrical current comes from the movement of tiny things called electrons, and then you discover that these 'things' are somehow both objects and waves, and can be in many different places at the same time, and this enables you to do things with electrical current which would have previously seemed impossible.
So we can find the truth - enough of the truth to satisfy us - but we have to remember that this truth is always partial, and it can only be provisional.
The Search for Truth
Since the dawn of history, and before, people have always engaged in the search for truth. This is good, and for the most part we respect and celebrate the people who have helped us discover truth. But there is a dark side to this activity: the people who believe they have found the truth, and refuse to look further.
Each generation of scientists challenges the understanding of the previous generation, and most of the time they find themselves opposed by the scientific establishment. As Max Planck told us, 'Science progresses one funeral at a time'. (To be precise, he actually wrote in his autobiography, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.") We see the same process in the arts and humanities: the expert art critics hated the early works of the Expressionists, the theatre critics dismissed the 'angry young men', and so on.
The search for truth is good, right up to the point where you think you have found it.
Truth and Faith
Some people will be agreeing with me and rubbing their hands in glee, confident that that this confirms what they have been saying all along - those religious people with their fake certainties are just deluded.
And some people will be disagreeing with me because they have found the truth. I know many people who would say they have found the truth in Jesus, and many others would say that have found it in other places.
I can't speak for the other sources of truth, but when it comes to Jesus, I am confident of this: we get tripped up by our language. Christians get so used to using certain words, and especially words that we find in the Bible, that we tend to forget that the words we find so precious are only pointers.
in John's Gospel, we read about various miracles. John describes them as 'signs' - yes, they happened, but their significance goes beyond the actual event: they point to, they tell us something about a spiritual reality which was being made flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The important thing is what those events tell us - about God, about ourselves, about the world we live in, about possibilities for the future.
In John's Gospel, Jesus does describe Himself as 'the truth'. So, on one level, it is valid, if you have encountered Jesus, to say that you have found the truth. But what sort of truth have you found? It is a person. A person who also describes Himself as 'the way' and 'the life'. He is the truth, in that He reveals the things you really need to know; He is the way, in that He will not lead you astray; He is the life, in that if you turn your back on the truth He reveals and the path He guides you on, you will only discover death and destruction at the end of that road. He teaches love - love for all, even your worst enemy - as the only way to justice and peace: you may find this message too hard, but He claims it is the only way.
In the Gospels, we read that many people found Jesus - went to Him, listened to Him, engaged with Him. But only some of them went on to follow Him. People sometimes talk about 'finding the truth' as an intellectual exercise, something equivalent to finding a lost phone. But, with Jesus, locating the truth and understanding it is only the start: the important question is what you do with it. In the Authorised Version of the Bible, in the Old Testament we read on various occasions that someone 'knew' his wife, and generally this resulted in them having a child. In that culture, knowing was much more than just an intellectual appreciation - it was a deep and life-changing commitment.
And those who make a deep and life-changing commitment to Jesus might say that they have found Jesus, or they have found the truth, but they will also say that they are only just beginning to appreciate Jesus for who He is, they are only just beginning to understand this truth, and how to live it. If you find the truth in Jesus, you do not find a trite certainty: you find yourself at the start of a lifelong exploration of truth and grace and life and love, you find that you have committed yourself to a life of learning and challenge and growing and loving your enemies, and discovering that you are loved more than you ever thought possible.
To put it another way, the search for truth is good, right up to the point where you think you have found it. If you think you have found the truth in Jesus - or anyone, or anything else - and therefore you can stop looking, then what has happened is this: you have not found the truth, just have just given up the search for it.
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