To Tell the Truth 

By Harry T. Cook 

1/4/13

Harry T. Cook

However many times a witness takes the stand in a courtroom and swears an oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," he or she is doomed to violate that oath within minutes.

This is not to impugn the honesty of anyone. It is to say that truth is as relative as anything Einstein ever thought of. It is to say that the whole truth about anything is unknowable by finite creatures such as we are. The phrase "nothing but the truth" partakes in fantasy, as if any person can speak at any given moment nothing but what the absolute truth may be -- seeing that there may be no such thing as absolute truth.

During testimony as to what time or day it is, it may be noon in a Vermont courtroom while it is 9 a.m. in Oregon, barely dawn in Hawaii and the next day in Japan. All of those are true from a global point of view, yet only one of them in a particular setting.

"What is truth"? Pontius Pilate is said to have asked Jesus. /1 In that text, the original word is the Greek αληθεια, meaning not a static fact, if fact it is, but that which is in a given moment disclosed -- or as it has been said, "The manifested veritable essence of a matter." /2

One of the besetting sins of human beings is the certitude we each and often display about one thing or another. We do so in the face of natural ambiguity and unavoidable ignorance.

A few weeks ago, I was an aural witness to an argument between two men in my neighborhood barbershop -- a venue of wisdom tried and true if ever there was one. Whilst their barbers worked on their heads, the guys were watching some kind of talk show -- yet another fount of wisdom -- on the perpetually playing television.

The subject under discussion on the show was the age of Earth. One participant, very obviously a member of the reverend clergy, was offering incontrovertible proof that Earth was but 6,000-some years old. His opponent was a scientist -- a physicist, I think -- whose blood pressure must have been at stroke level as he tried but failed to persuade the other fellow and the show's host that Earth was a -- not even the final -- result of the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago.

The scientist said it would be difficult to pinpoint the moment in Earth time -- hour, day, year, decade or even a particular century -- during which the bang would have taken place. Thus was the good reverend presented with a glorious opportunity, forthwith laying down his trump card, viz. Bible-based evidence that Earth was spoken into being by the deity of the Bible on October, 23, 4004 BCE.

End of discussion. Reverend: 40; Scientist: Love. Neither ambiguity nor doubt. 'Twas the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That was the conclusion of the show's host, who smiled broadly, and of the audience that sent up cheers and applause as supporters of that "truth." Of course, that "truth" is a falsehood. And, truth to tell, the Big Bang is not a fact, but an hypothesis -- yet a pretty sound one, astrophysicists say.

So how do human beings perceive truth about anything? The age of Earth, the testimony of a witness, the report of an event, a story about why one's husband came home from work two hours late again?

A passage in a Graham Greene novel may suggest something of the nature of truth: It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to the other. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag? 

As a pendulum swings on its arc, each nano-instant it passes a point, and in the next another and in the next yet another. At which of those points would one find the truth about the pendulum itself, the calculus of its arc or about a law of motion?

To be persuaded of a given truth, e.g. that two plus two is always four, is to feel some degree of dependability about one's world. To know that if one goes two miles in a given direction from where he is now he will arrive at home is the stuff of which surety is made. But how does one come into possession of that particular truth? One possesses it because he or she has traveled that two miles at least once and remembers, or a thousand times and continues to do so on automatic pilot.

What Galileo and Bacon introduced the modern age to the idea of putting claims of truth to the tests of observation and experiment, it ignited a fire in the imaginations of the willing to seek truth their way. What we might call the "scientific method" began to eclipse the ecclesiastical ukase as a source of explanations about how things were, or at least might be.

It took Albert Einstein to help us appreciate the phenomenon of relativity in terms of time and space. When as a boy I looked down on our little village from the highest hill around, I happened one day to see a railroad locomotive standing at the station below at what was perhaps as much as a mile or more distant. I observed the steam discharge from the whistle just an instant before I heard its sound. I did not know then that I had seen a crude example of relativity.

What was the truth of the matter? Did I, a mile way, hear the whistle at exactly the same instant it was heard by the station agent standing next to the locomotive? No, I did not, but it was the same sound. Or was it? Did the atmosphere between me and the whistle mechanism change the sound in any way? Probably. To the station agent the sound was louder and more immediate. To me, less audible and more remote. In musical terms, the agent would have said the whistle was fortissimo, and I pianissimo.

With this first essay of 2013, I float the following proposition: In all that is sure to come along in this year in terms of global and domestic conflict, is it possible that as human beings we might rely less on a priori claims of truth and more on those we might call a posteriori, i.e. those based upon actual observation or experimental data, deriving talking points from evidence rather than the fiats of self-anointed authority.

From the mosques of militant Islam, the bimas of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the pulpits of evangelical fundamentalist churches, the curial conclaves of Roman Catholicism, the dais of the United Nations General Assembly, the well of the U.S. Senate and the floor of the House of Representatives may hunger for inquiry and common understanding prevail over the urge to harangue and convert.

1/ John 18: 38

2/ Cremer, Hermann. Biblio-Theological Lexicon of New Testament Greek. New York, NY. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895. 84

3/ Greene, Graham. The End of the Affair. New York, NY. Penguin Books, 1962. 110

re essay of 12/28/12 Innocents, Innocence and the Reparations of Righteous Labor      

Jack Lessenberry, Huntington Woods, MI:

Sometimes I think Original Sin is the only believable part of the whole Christian myth . . . Wonderful essay.

Harvey H. Guthrie, Fillmore, CA:

Nice, Harry -- in the most profound sense of that adjective.

 Rabbi Larry Maher, Tampa, FL:

Good stuff'! But the Book of Common Prayer has it all wrong. The establishment of the "...rule of justice, love and peace" will come about through human effort, not God's will. Why is it that we assign all of the difficult things to God, and thus absolve ourselves from our personal failures?

George Ashberry, Brooklyn, NY:

Your analysis of innocence is entirely sound. I will share it with my discussion at church on Sunday and let you know, if you don't mind, the outcome of our discussion.

Elizabeth Downey, Mountain Hills, NJ:

Would that someone of your ability and insight would be listened to by President Obama and the numbskulls in Congress who are beholden to the National Rifle Association. Apparently 20 kindergartners dead is not yet enough to get their attention.

Blanche Powers, Knoxville, TN:

Don't look for help from my state. I think most Americans kind of like the Wild, Wild West idea. But at least in those old oaters the gun toters were required to check them at the saloon door. Let 'em fight with their fists, if they must fight at all. God, have mercy.

Kenneth Robinson, Detroit, MI:

The disarming of peace-loving people like me will have to come after the disarming of the thugs and brigands who have made the streets of this city like a war zone. Nonetheless, I agree with you in principle. It's like we as a nation have descended into insanity.

Rusty Hancock, Madison Heights, MI:

How do we wind up making decisions such as attacking Iraq after 9/11 when most of the hijackers were Saudis? How do you punish one nation for the actions of an organization that is multinational? We're in the same territory here as trying to decide such problems as how to deal with, e.g. same-sex marriage. You've got a situation that could be dealt with rather simply if not for our centuries of entwining church and state to the point where it becomes problematical to disentwine them, much like trying to separate conjoined twins while doing the least amount of damage to both of them. We have created a situation that almost guarantees that its solution will hurt somebody, or at the very least, it will create a lot of confusion that could have been avoided years ago if we had adhered to our own principles instead of clouding them. My example lends itself to a simpler solution than dealing with international terrorists, so the analogy limps. Simply affording legal protection to everyone and letting churches do as they pleased should please everyone. Of course it wouldn't, because bigots do enjoy having the state back up their prejudices with the force of law, and people hearing themselves demonized from the pulpit would still be offended, and rightly so. But it would at least be doable and defendable. The problem with situations whose rationale is "but everybody knows that!" is that, quite often, what everybody knows, is simply wrong. For years after 9/11, long after even the Bush administration had admitted that Iraq had little or nothing to do with the attack, polls showed huge percentages of people being convinced that Iraq was behind it. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I am reminded of a comment to a political article I was reading recently, about the role of the mainstream media in politics. Many of them have a philosophy that goes like this:  "One major party declares that the world is flat, the other disagrees. We present both sides for your consideration."  As long as that sort of reportage is the norm, the loudest voice will prevail, even if it is shouting absolute tripe.