What Is Truth?

There is an age-old question, the answer to which is earnestly important to all of us at all times: “What is truth?” There are those who would define it as a relative term⎯those who would say that what is commonly thought to be true by the constituted authorities of any particular time or place is true for that time or place. That is to say, what is generally believed to be true today is true for this day. But to say this is also to say that what was believed to be true yesterday was true yesterday. In other words, if a man stands in the pulpit or in the market place or in the classroom and proclaims what he and his generation believe to be the truth, it is said by some that he is speaking the truth. This sounds very plausible until we reduce it to specific cases. There was a generation that believed and proclaimed that the world was flat. They were sincere in this belief, and they thought they were proclaiming truth⎯but that didn’t make the world flat, and the truth was and is that the world was not and is not flat. And so we could go on multiplying examples of what people have believed and have not believed, suddenly to come to the realization that no matter what men at a given time happen to believe, it isn’t true, their belief doesn’t make it true. Truth cannot be made or unmade by arbitrary authority, nor by the belief or unbelief of any man or any generation of men. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”¹ But a falsehood or an error couldn’t make a man free. Indeed, it would shackle him with chains of ignorance. And so we must come to the conclusion that truth is not an unpredictable variable but a determinable constant. Popular conception of what constitutes truth can change⎯but not truth, for “truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.”² And it doesn’t matter where it is found or who discovers it, it is the common property of the whole universe. Our knowledge of it may increase; our ignorance concerning it may be profound; our willingness or unwillingness to accept it may vary⎯but what is fundamentally true today will always be true. Truth is eternal, and never shall we be called upon by that God whose glory is intelligence and whose first law is order, to discard any fragment of truth, scientific or religious or whatever men may call it ⎯but assuredly we may expect to be called upon to discard a good many of our theories and opinions.