From Fact to Fabrication

“Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun . . . Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? (“The Madman,” Friedrich Nietzsche)

A little experiment If you’ve grown weary of vapid chatter about the price of gas, the latest guest on Oprah, and the merits of cable versus DSL, try this the next time you’re in a social setting: Ask, “Who believes in truth?” After the room revives from the dead skunk you’ve tossed on the carpet, continue, “No, really; who believes that truth exists and that it is knowable?”

In my experience, whether you do this with co-workers, neighbors, or church members, the conversation will proceed something like this:

You’re talking about absolute truth?

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Well, that all depends.

Depends on what?

On your viewpoint. Have you seen that sketch—the one that looks like a hag or a beautiful girl.

Yeah.

Well, which is it—a picture of a girl or a hag?

Maybe it’s neither.

Exactly! It all depends.

Can we get off this gerbil run? Depends on what?

Okay. We’re all products of nature and nurture which causes us to see things differently. As to the sketch—I may see a hag, but that gives me no right to claim that it is a hag, or that others are wrong if they see something else. In the end, who’s to say what it is, or if it’s anything but a poor artist’s scribbling?

The interlocutor reflects the prevailing sentiment of the day: truth is not an objective, overarching statement about reality; it is personal perception shaped by our genetic and experiential makeup. Among sophisticates, such relativistic thinking is all the rage. Yet few realize that their fashionable ideas are really quite old.

NOTHING NEW
Nearly 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Protagoras created quite a stir when he uttered, “Man is the measure of all things.” It inspired a new wave of thinkers to correct those antediluvian misgivings about transcendent truth.

At the forefront was Gorgias who insisted, “Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and if something could be known about it, knowledge about it couldn't be communicated to others.” With the myth of certain truth duly exposed, a new school of thought was born: sophism.

Like the modern-day hag/girl drawing, a favorite sophist illustration was the parable of the wind: One person feels the wind as cold, while another feels it as warm. And since the wind can’t be both warm and cold, it’s the individual--not external reality--that determines its properties. In fact, maybe it’s the individual that determines the very existence of the wind. Maybe.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS
By the eighteenth century, the relativism of sophistry was formalized by Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that the world as it really is—which he referred to as noumena—is hidden from the human mind. All we have are phenomena—a Kantian term for sensory perceptions interpreted by the mind. In step with the sophists, Kant challenged the age-old assumption of objective reality with one sentence: “Mind is the law-giver to nature.”

With all the force of six words, reality was dislodged from its sure footing to become an observer-dependent creation. It was nothing less than a Copernican revolution of thought, placing society on a journey in uncharted waters without map, compass, captain, or helmsman.

After the metaphysics of Kant came the physics of Einstein. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein rattled the cages of the scientific academy with relativity theory. Measures of time and even length were no longer experienced universally; they depended on an individual’s movement. However, little did this one-time Swiss patent clerk foresee how his theories would influence a generation of relativists ready to dismiss truth with a shrug and a sneer.

A few years later, Werner Heisenberg shook the academy from its very foundations with quantum theory. Heisenberg discovered that what we “see” at the building block level of nature, depends on how we “look.” Shockingly, the microcosm wasn’t a world of things; it was a plenum of probabilities.

Relativity theory and quantum theory formed the empirical backbone of modern relativism. Together, they validated the “truth” about truth that the Eastern mystics had been telling us all along: objective truth is an illusion.

EXAMINING THE ELEPHANT
By the 1960’s, East met West in “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” In the famous fable, six sightless investigators examined different parts of a pachyderm to conclude that it is like a tree, a rope, a wall, a branch, a fan, a spear. The lesson? They were all right. The application? We, too, are blind men with no privileged position to judge the perspectives of others. The conclusion? If all we have are the records of our diverse experiences fumbling in the dark, practically speaking, there is no elephant! Gorgias would be proud.

But if truth cannot be discovered and, in fact, does not exist, it is our creation. No one takes that more seriously than those raised by parents who grew up in the '60s. Just ask Korey Rowe and Dylan Avery, two college students who co-produced the independent film, Loose Change.

COUNTING “LOOSE CHANGE”
Loose Change is a $10,000 production its young producers say “shows direct connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the United States government.” According to Rowe and Avery, the tragedy of 9/11 was not the work of Islamic terrorists; it was a sinister act of our own government to justify going to war. What’s more, those weren’t commercial airliners that crashed into the Pentagon on that fateful day, they were U.S. cruise missiles. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Amazingly, the film has gained currency, especially among college students, despite eyewitness reports, film footage, commercial jet debris, recovered black boxes and, oh yes, the fact that all the passengers on those flights were actually killed and buried!

Even better are the reasons given among young people for supporting the film: “We don’t know the whole truth” (So I guess we just make something up?); “It’s good to raise questions” (Maybe we should also question whether 2 plus 2 really equals 4?); “It stimulates critical thinking” (About as much as wasting thought on Holocaust denial theories). But my personal favorite, a la American Bandstand, is: “[It is] catchy, hip, with an upbeat soundtrack.” That oughta do it.

Loose Change marks the nadir of relativism, in which truth has devolved from what is “really real”; to what I experience is real; to whatever I can manufacture and make you believe is real. And all of this with the support of modern science! Einstein and Heisenberg would have shuddered.

BACK TO ALBERT AND WERNER
While quantum weirdness convinced Heisenberg that the world of protons, positrons, and photons was a mysterium whose disclosures were observer-dependent, he never doubted the objectivity of pebbles, parks and people. Even the strange goings-on in the micro-verse were the results of the quantum potential whose existence was absolute and universal. Despite the claims of transcendental science, the “elephant” exists, and not in a "Schrödinger’s cat" spectrum of quantum states splitting off into parallel universes or waiting to materialize by the observation of a curious observer.

The same is true for Einstein. While he accepted that movement through space and time was subject-dependent, he knew that—because of the universal nature of light—movement through spacetime was not. Einstein was so fully convinced in the objective existence of the universe—at all levels—that he could never embrace quantum theory because of its contingent implications.

Sadly, none of this prevented co-opting these great scientists as pioneers of modern relativism. Sadder yet, is that in our subjecentric universe, we have lost the ability to distinguish truth from belief.

Unlike beliefs which depend on us and our minds for existence; truth is independent of us. It is not contingent on our acknowledgement or even our existence. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell put it, “[T]he truth of a belief is something not involving beliefs, or (in general) any mind at all, but only the objects of belief.”

Notwithstanding the claims of our modern sirens, truth is true regardless of our perceptions and beliefs no matter how sincerely we hold them. Neither is it something we invent. Rather, truth is something we discover. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “We can no more create truth than we can create a new law of nature, like the law of gravity.” Sorry Messrs. Rowe and Avery.

Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer and a Centurion of the Wilberforce Forum. His "All Things Examined" column appears on BreakPoint every other Friday. Serving as a men’s ministry leader and worldview teacher in his community, Regis publishes a free weekly commentary to stimulate thought on current issues from a Christian perspective. To be placed on this free e-mail distribution list, e-mail him at: centurion51@aol.com.