A problem I frequently encounter
with people who reject God is the issue of truth. There lies a certain false
presupposition that we as a collective culture are capable of finding a sort of
ultimate truth that transcends all individual cultures and can find a set of
standards to hold to all mankind. In this paper I’m going to look at the nature
of truth, why humans are bad at creating it, and the truth that is offered us
in the scripture. It is my intention to show that without the Bible and God, we
can no more fabricate standards to hold ourselves to, then we can be perfect
people through sheer willpower alone.
I had a conversation with a friend
that rejects the notion of God is actually fed up with the church in general.
In the course of our conversation he said that humans have the potential to
become basically good and that through the power of positive thinking and the
like we can rid ourselves of the many plagues of evil wrought by mankind. The
problem with this is a basic one. If we are to better ourselves we must then
hold ourselves to a higher standard. This higher standard most atheists believe
will be something of a human construction and will be achieved by a general
consensus of what’s moral and good. The issue with that is that men are
basically evil and prone to selfishness and greed. Men will, all too often, act
for their own best interest and they will care very little for the suffering their
actions incur. Men murder, lie and steal if they find it profitable and they
can get away with it. This issue has been the subject of many classic works of
literature like The Invisible Man, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and Lord of the Flies. So then if mankind is
itself the source of such evil and debauchery then how can we lift ourselves up
from such a point of fallen grace? Meaning, if we are the source of these evils
then how can we possibly expect to create a set of morals that will change
human nature if those morals are birthed out of that same place where the evil
originated?
There
are two basic different kinds of truth. The first type of truth is subjective
truth. This is when someone says something like “Chocolate is the best flavor
of ice cream”. While people may disagree with that person, this is an issue of preference
and therefore we wouldn't say that it’s wrong. Things that fall into the
category of subjective truth can be things regarding aesthetic beauty, music,
food, or books. Things that do not belong in the category of subjective truths
are things like morals. For instance although some would agree that the
statement “abortion is wrong” is a subjective truth, as Christians we would say
that it doesn’t matter who you are or what your opinion is, abortion is always
wrong. That’s where we enter into the arena of the second type of truth and
that is objective truth. If I were to say that I am 26 years old and I showed
my birth certificate to prove it, no one would call me a liar. If I were to
say, however that homosexuality is a sin, that’s where people would call me
wrong and say that what I claim simply isn’t true. Those objections would be
valid if I were saying that homosexuality was wrong on my own authority, but I
am not. When I make such a judgment statement I say that with the full weight
and backing of scripture which says that homosexuality is wrong. So if in the
first kind of truth, the subjective kind, people can be considered the
authority because the truth is dependent on who speaks it, then on whose
authority do the objective truths lie?
The fact of the matter is that
mankind is terrible at coming up with truth because we are fallen creatures who
live in a fallen world. Take slavery for instance. A little over 200 years ago
slavery was considered by some to be a morally permissible practice that far
too many people in America allowed. Through books and treatises like Uncle Tom's Cabin however, there was a
moral awakening and by signing into effect the Emancipation Proclamation,
Lincoln abolished slavery and as a culture we haven’t turned back. So one could
credibly argue that slavery is an excellent example of how men can and will discover
truth, like the one that slavery is wrong, and impose a new truth to the
betterment of society. The problem is of course that it took so long to get to
that point. For thousands of years slavery was permissible in every civilized
country at one point or another and mankind did nothing about it. At every
instance where our more “enlightened” society has righted some moral wrong, we
have only to look to history to see how long we've let it go on prior to that. If
men are really good at their core then why is it that we have had to come to so
many revelations about moral issues throughout history? Why haven’t we been
observing these practices since the dawn of time? The answer seems obvious, it’s
because we are not naturally good people who are adept at distinguishing truth
and putting good practices into motion. We are fundamentally flawed and prone
to evil. If we are prone to evil, then it seems fair to say that the desire to
do wrong lies in the very essence of who we are. And if that’s true, then how
can we ever look to ourselves to fully rid the world of evil? It seems more
likely that we must look to some sort of external source outside ourselves and
adopt its standards as our own if we ever want to reach a point of actual truth
and moral goodness.
It is at this point in my
argument that causes friction. Some would argue that while it may be true that
we need an external source to dictate what is right and what is wrong, many
will disagree that the Bible should be that source of truth. This is a fair
point and it is here that faith comes into the picture. People might look to
history and point out that the church itself was responsible for many
atrocities committed against mankind, and some would even say that the trend
continues in our modern day society. To
that I say this; the wrongs committed by the church in past and at present were
not the result of God himself, but rather the result of flawed men claiming the
authority of God and imposing their will, and not God’s, onto people. If we
were to really look at the truth of scripture we can see that it was
progressive far beyond its time and that if men and women really examined it as
a source of truth then many of the social injustices we see today would have
been righted a long time ago. When Jesus said in Luke 10 to love your neighbor
as yourself and then further defined a neighbor as someone that might initially
be considered your enemy or different than yourself, that seems to rule out
slavery if taken to heart. In James 1 we are told to care for the orphans and
widows which would eradicate the marginalization of children worldwide. Matthew
25 commands us to treat all men as representatives of God’s kingdom and to take
care of them, eliminating abuse of our fellow man in general. All of these
scriptures rest fully on the authority of God and claim him as the ultimate
truth. In John 14 we see that Jesus identifies himself as the physical
representation of truth itself and what’s more life itself. Here then we have a
much needed external source that can lift us out of our self-conceit and sinful
nature.
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