Notes: from the class discussion: (With a final note/summary
on truth)
1. consumer mentality = truth
2. truth = representing the world accurately
3. linguistic – truth is the state of the case Truth
= what is true
4. truth is external to humanity and truth exists.
5. Confucianism – intuition leads to knowledge and
truth, truth is eternal, accomplishes its ends without being
conscious.
6. scientific = low levels of uncertainty – high probability
of truth.
7. images may be changed to change truth
8. truth is dependent on appearance/reality – truth
is what really is and we cannot ever know truth because we
live by appearances – the infinite, mysterious vs the
real
9. correspondence view – true is what corresponds with
reality (proven true) vs relevance view
10. some truths cannot be proven true, well because they
are spiritual truths
11. tests don’t tell the truth – assessment is
not truth.
12. proof cannot be a requirement for truth
13. Keirkegaard – objective truth is meaningless (God
is true) vs subjective truth ( I believe in God).
14. Is all truth context dependent? Universal truths, math,
physics, logic – truth only exists in context
15. Related to the assumptions underlying science.
16. Falsification may also be limited by the state of knowledge
of the times. truth vs untruth.
17. Once you think something is true, you must apply it to
your worldview, life etc.
18. Truth = Christian or Scriptures - do we want to go there?
Fact vs Faith vs the Truth is out there (heaven…) vs…
truth is three dimensional and we are linear, infinite
vs finite, (truth = like God)
Is Christianity, the Bible, closest to the truth?
But what about the tremendous difference in perceptions among
Christians.
Where does the concept of relationship come into truth (logical
does not necessarily = truth)
Does Truth = Reality = Existence = Fact
Truth is what we do to engage reality – “righteousness”
Truth affects the entire way I exist.
Faith in truth vs actions following from faith in truth.
Truth is “listening”
True vs Truth
We want to prove that God is True, but what was the truth
that God in the Creation of humanity revealed.
9 has no color, so asking if something is true is a similar
type of faulty thinking. not valid questions.
Truth is the process of moving to what ought to
be in God’s
intention for Humanity and for us as individuals. In a review of a book called WHAT IS TRUTH?": TOWARDS A
THEOLOGICAL POETICS. By Andrew Shanks. New York: Routledge,
2001, JACK A. BONSOR says the following about truth.
Pilate's question discloses the perennial opposition
between kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of God. It
is a conflict about power, honesty, and truth.
Pilate represents the order imposed by political and religious
power. Jesus
reveals/is the truth that is love. "In what
sort of thinking does this truth come to expression?" (4)
Christians commonly mistake truth for metaphysical opinion.
This kind of thinking
stems from a pathos of glory, a passion in the service of
political and religious order. In contrast, the poetic can
elicit a more primordial truth rooted in a pathos of shakenness.
It destabilizes and thereby enables the honest openness that
underlies authentic truth claims. Shanks points to Amos as
the first instance of this model in JudeoChristian tradition.
The truth of Amos is not the accuracy of his predictions,
which proved wrong, but the imaginative power of his oracles
to shake moral inertia (52). Amos turns
the religious imagination from cultic conformity to responsibility
for justice. Heidegger
correctly criticizes Christianity for reducing truth to metaphysical
claims. The consequent poetic impoverishment renders the
faith not religious enough. But Heidegger's elite of Greco-German
poets and thinkers is another example of the pathos of glory.
[Bonsor, Jack A . 2003. "What is Truth ?" Towards
a Theological Poetics (Book Review). Theological
Studies . 64(1):97.]
I think that some of Bonsor's ideas get at the problems
of truth. To often we get hung up in what WE want to
be REALITY, and lose sight of what God has called (hoped
for) humanity to do and be. Micah 6:8 says, He
has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD
require of
you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly
with your God? I wonder if we really lived in
truth what the world would really be like today and then wonder
even more if that is not what we are called to do is to work
for justice, for all humanity and for all Creation, to proceed,
process, move "further up and further in", to be more God-like? Maybe
we need to be a bit more like Amos and shake some "moral inertia".
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