I Think Truth is Impossible, and That’s Okay
A 2,000-year-old question (that is far, far older than that) used to keep me up at night. But it doesn’t anymore.
I: An Inconvenient Game
For what it’s worth, he was in a tough spot.
He thought himself a reasonable man who majored in expediency and compromise, which is why he’d been stationed at his post for the sake of keeping the peace and preventing an insurrection against his bosses — particularly Tiberias, the emperor. Judea was something of a hotspot for insurrectionist activity: the Jews and Samaritans didn’t take too kindly to the Roman occupation of their land.
But here he was, the peacekeeping prefect, staring down a bloodied man and listening to an increasingly agitated crowd shouting how badly he needed to die.
This crowd wasn’t just any ordinary collection of people, either. When he’d come into power, there was a kind of agreement struck between the Romans and the Jews. As long as they kept in line and didn’t raise any kind of anti-Rome rabble, the Jewish Sanhedrin could handle the affairs of its own people.
This was just as well: the Jews wanted nothing to do with their Roman occupiers and Rome wanted to keep the citizens under its governance sedated. Pay your taxes. Don’t stage uprisings. Stay out of each other’s way. That was good enough for the emperor, and it was certainly good enough for this middle-class Roman prefect from a small clan of the Pontii people.
His name was Pilate.
Standing there, listening to the Sanhedrin whip the crowd into a frenzy and considering a man who looked as harmful as a shorn lamb, Pilate had his back to the wall. Already today, before the sun came up, this man had stood exactly like he was now before Caiaphas, the High Priest. That was Jewish territory. Out of Pilate’s purview.
But now he was very much in Pilate’s purview: he was standing in Pilate’s living room.
Pilate excused himself and had a word with the Jewish officials. “What did you say this guy did again?”
Their answer: “Would we have handed him over if he hadn’t done something worth dying over?”
The riddles, Pilate probably thought. He responded, “Fine. Then take him away and judge him by your own laws.”
“We can’t,” they said. “We don’t have the legal right. Only the Romans can execute someone.”
Technically, this was right. But Pilate was starting to get annoyed. He wasn’t supposed to be here; he should’ve been in Cesarea Philippi at his home. Prefects only came here during feast time to keep an eye on all of the people gathering. To prevent insurrection from spreading like mold.
But this was not an insurrection. Pilate felt no threat toward Rome, particularly because of what he’d been told this man’s claims were: that he was the King of the Jews. So what? He may be their king, but he’s not their emperor. This doesn’t matter to me. He went back inside to ask point blank: “Are you the king of the Jews?”
The man standing before him answered, “Is this your own question, or did others tell you about me?”
THE RIDDLES, Pilate probably thought again. But he recognized what was going on. He’d heard about the ways these Rabbis taught. It was an ancient method already. The answers to questions were questions. Questions responding to questions, sloping asymptotes on the way to understanding. Pilate could do that, too.
“Am I a Jew?” He said, irritated, before changing the form of their discussion. He wasn’t going to play games, not today. “Look. Your own people brought you here. The people in charge of your people brought you here. Why?”
What Pilate saw in Jesus’ eyes, we don’t know. But Jesus saw something in Pilate’s. He knew the razor Pilate wanted to take to this situation. He wanted to section this moment off, pass it on to the Jews. Wash his hands of it. Jesus wasn’t going to let that happen easily.
Instead of answering directly, Jesus answered the question Pilate had asked already. “My kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world.”
Pilate wasn’t going to take that bait. This was not a morning to dabble in metaphysics and aphorisms; it was a morning to end this, in his eyes, pointless local drama. He needed something he could act on. He needed a confession that could hold some political weight to get this issue off of his plate: “So you are a king?”
Again, Jesus knew the road this question headed down. It was the one he was already on, the one he would stay on until he was buried alongside it. But even on this trodden, anguished path, Jesus saw the opportunity to plant a seed. So for the first time, Jesus answered directly and then promptly anted up: “You say I am a king. Actually, I was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. All who love the truth recognize what I say is true.”
Pilate knew where this was going, and he was not about it. He had no intention of turning his political headquarters into Athens, where philosophers would sit around and ask unanswerable questions at each other. This was government. This was a job. He had things to do. Dealing with this was not one of them.
So he answered the way the philosophers on the hill would have answered had they been faced with the question. Before he turned around to head back outside, Pilate played the little game with Jesus for the last time, and promptly shut down the discussion.
“What is truth?”
What is truth, indeed.
II: A Really Old Problem
Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare hadn’t written a single word. Ponce de León had only just landed across the Atlantic and named the land La Florida. Queen Elizabeth I wasn’t even born yet. Five hundred years is a long time.
Five hundred years before Jesus appeared one morning in Pilate’s courtyard, a chubby, bearded rabblerouser was causing a ruckus in Greece.
Socrates is said to have been short with stubby features, balding, and contemporary descriptions of him describe his gait as that of a duck. He was a bit of a sagely bridge troll.
At his home in Athens, there was a famous temple at Delphi where the oracles lived. Leading up to the entryway to this temple, the words γνῶθι σεαυτόν — “Know Thyself” — were engraved into the stone.
When it was engraved, it meant something different than perhaps the modern reader would think. They would have read it as, “Know your station in life. Let gods be gods, let kings be kings, and don’t try to upset someone else’s position in the social sphere.”
Socrates flipped this aphorism on its head and then paired it with one of his most famous assertions: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He took “Know Thyself” from the context of knowing your place in regards to community and implanted meaning “know who you are internally.” He turned it from extrospection to introspection.
Value systems weren’t the only thing he upended. One of the more enduring institutions he changed was instruction itself. He had this way of teaching that was incredibly annoying, which we have come to call the Socratic Method. In this method, direct instruction is all but nonexistent; the teacher doesn’t instruct, they question. Each sentence the student speaks is answered with a question. Questions after questions, asymptotes on the way to understanding.
So even though he was famous for this line of questioning, there’s one dialogue he has that stands out as a little bit strange: in it, he gives a direct answer. He’s having a conversation with a man named Glaucon, in which they are trying to get at the root of what a philosopher is. Eventually, Glaucon asks, “whom do you mean by ‘genuine philosophers’?”
Socrates answered him straight up: “The genuine philosopher is one whose passion it is to see the truth.”
You can see Pilate’s eye roll from here.
Greece rolled its eyes at Socrates, too. He was eventually sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and teaching against the gods of the state, but his ideas endured. They inspired his student, Plato. And Plato’s student, Aristotle. And then the entirety of the Christian tradition, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution.
We even see Socrates’ influence in Scripture. He’s all but named!
Notice Acts 17:16–18 (emphasis mine):
While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply troubled by all the idols he saw everywhere in the city. He went to the synagogue to reason with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, and he spoke daily in the public square to all who happened to be there.
He also had a debate with some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. When he told them about Jesus and his resurrection, they said, “What’s this babbler trying to say with these strange ideas he’s picked up?” Others said, “He seems to be preaching about some foreign gods.”
Here’s Paul in Socrates’ birthplace five hundred years after Socrates taught there, and he’s debating with two types of people: Epicureans and Stoics.
The Stoics were disciples of a man named Antisthenes, who was, you might have guessed, a student of Socrates. The Epicureans developed out of the Stoics, in opposition to their lines of thinking. Socrates birthed both of them. And Paul was there, in the birthplace of Western thought, going toe-to-toe with their best thinkers, and delivering the good news about Jesus.
Every bit of this informs the hand-wave Pilate gave Jesus on the morning of his execution. The Socratic Method had already spread far and wide; professional philosophers were already arguing loudly in public places; pedantic discussions flashed their bright red warning lights.
One of these types, Pilate’s dismissive answer suggests. I’m not going to argue about what truth is on a Friday morning.
Pilate’s sarcastic “what is truth?” is sarcastic, a parody of the Socratic Dialectic that he was undoubtedly familiar with, and most definitely annoyed by. A sigh of resignation and over-it. This man standing in front of him is nothing more than an annoyance, muddying up his morning and causing a ruckus about truth.
But his question is even more bothersome than you might be thinking.
III: A Pedigree of Much Despair
Some time before he was standing before Pilate, Jesus said something difficult to the people who believed that he was who he said he was:
You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
He said that you will know the truth. The Truth.
What is Truth?
What a slippery question.
In the 1800s, Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier coined the term “Epistemology,” which takes its name from two Greek words: episteme, meaning knowledge and understanding, and logos, meaning the study of. So epistemology means “the study of how we know things.”
Ferrier, standing at the end of a long line of people asking questions about Truth (which he represents with the word Knowledge — notice the capital letters), came to a conclusion.
If we are to Know (K) something, we must have a true (T) belief (B) about it.
Let’s put it in an example.
I am currently typing this from Atlanta, Georgia. If I told you, “I am in Atlanta,” we could credit that to my account as knowledge. It turns out that my Belief of my location (Georgia) is True.
Amazing. Case closed. Knowledge and Truth solved.
Unfortunately, there are two problems with this definition.
1. It needs something else.
If Knowledge is simply the act of collecting true beliefs, finding Truth is as simple as memorizing the dictionary. You can find all kinds of “true” things in there. Loads of things that are not wrong. That kind of knowledge is fine for statements like “I know that I’m sitting at my desk,” but it doesn’t really cut it for bigger things. Try it on for “I know that God exists.”
It falls a little short.
Let’s try another example to illustrate exactly what this definition lacks.
You’re at a horse race with two friends, Smith and Jones. Smith comes up to you and says, “I just put all of my money on Tinker Town. I just know that he’s going to win.” Naturally, you ask how he could know such a thing, and he replies, “Because, I mean, look at him! He’s a beautiful horse! How could such a beautiful horse lose?”
Right after Smith leaves in excitement to watch the race, Jones comes up beside you and tells you that he, too, put his money on Tinker Town. But when you ask him why, he whispers, “My cousin drugged the rest of the horses this morning.”
When Tinker Town inevitably won the race, which of the two friends do you think knew they had picked the winner? Even though each of their beliefs turned out to be true, we can only say that Jones knew which horse would win. Smith just got lucky.
But the question is, what can we add to “True Belief” in order to equal Knowledge?
One camp says that it’s Reliability.
Knowledge = a Reliably True Belief.
Here’s what that looks like.
You’re standing with a friend in a field, and she is a professional archer. You watch as she strings her bow in a particular way, notches an arrow the same way she has thousands of times before, draws, adjusts her breathing, gauges the wind, lets the arrow fly, and nails the bullseye in a hay bale fifty yards away.
Then you watch her do it again. And again. Nine shots out of the ten she takes are perfect bullseyes: we can say that she is a good archer because she can reliably hit the bullseye.
So imagine her surprise when it’s your turn. You step up, do your very best to imitate her steps, loose your arrow with a wish, and watch as it slams the hay bale dead center. You try to match those motions yet again and, much to your surprise, you watch yet another perfect shot sail toward its target.
In this little isolated incident, an onlooker would see two people who are both equally good at archery because you both produce reliable results (from their point of view). But you know, deep down, that there’s no way you should be considered an archer of your friend’s caliber. Like Smith in the previous example, you just got lucky.
Like our archers, Knowledge seems to need something more than what someone could stumble into. We can’t afford to be guessing and hoping on those bigger propositions, those “I know that God exists” propositions.
That’s handy, because there’s another camp in this debate. They think that what you need is not reliability but justification. Knowledge only counts if we understand the steps it took to get us there.
Knowledge = a Justified True Belief
Here’s what this looks like.
Your two friends from the horse track, Smith and Jones, are going in for an interview with their boss, where only one of them will get a raise. Smith has every reason to believe that Jones is the person who’s going to get the raise, due in part to his boss saying, “Smith, you’d better step it up. Jones is a shoe-in.” Smith had not stepped it up; he knows that Jones is going to beat him out.
As they are walking in, Jones notices a nickel and a penny on the ground and bends over to pick them up. He pockets the change and continues on his way, but Smith thinks, strangely, “Imagine that. The guy who gets this raise is going to have six cents in his pocket when he gets the news.”
His belief is perfectly justified: he’s been told that Jones is a shoe in for the raise, and he watched Jones pocket the change from the sidewalk. Much to his surprise, though, Smith is the one who gets the raise. Even more surprising was when he went to pay for lunch afterwards, he noticed he put yesterday’s change in his pocket that he had forgotten about: a nickel and a penny.
Smith’s knowledge that “the one who gets the raise will have six cents in his pocket” was absolutely true….but it feels a little anticlimactic. Like at the horse race, he just got lucky.
Turns out, knowing Truth is kind of tricky.
The spiral has begun. The number of pages devoted to trying to understand Truth grows every day, and it seems we’re no closer to understanding it than when we started.
Skeptics will argue, “Knowledge? Truth? You can’t even know that you’re not just a brain-in-a-vat experiencing a dream.”
Anti-skeptics will counter, “I can touch my two hands together and experience it as a real thing. That’s good enough for me.”
Coherentists will say, “Truth-gathering is like building a ship at sea. You’ve got to find what can keep you afloat for a while until you can step back and start replacing all of the boards that are rotten.”
Optimists will say, “Truth may not be knowable right now, but everything is eventually knowable, and the act of learning it is the engine of progress.”
Nihilists will say, “Yes, but truth is nothing but construct of consensus and convention.”
For every point there is a counterpoint. For every justification there is a string of necessary justifications.
It seems that the closer we get to what Truth is, the farther away from our grasp it seems to be. It is a sloping asymptote on the way to, but never reaching, understanding.
Still there is an echo of a promise made two thousand years ago pinging around the chambers of our hearts: you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.
What is Truth?
Perhaps Truth, after all, is impossible.
IV: Truth
Five hundred years before Jesus’ and Pilate’s conversation on the morning of Jesus’ execution, Socrates stirred up trouble in Greece. But this kind of thinking didn’t start with Socrates. Almost two hundred years before Socrates, there was a different Greek named Parmenides who was doing his own work with Truth.
He argued something remarkable:
There is not, nor shall there be, anything besides what is.
Again, you can feel Pilate’s sighing, sarcastic eye roll from here. Riddles and aphorisms. This will get us nowhere. It’s just pedantry and pretension.
Even though it is tedious, consider the implications of such an idea. You can’t conceive of something that doesn’t exist — even if it only exists as a thought. You can’t devise a color that you’ve never seen; you can’t invent a sound you’ve never heard. Once they are conceived of, they exist in your mind; if you make it, it exists in the “real world.”
I think that God might agree. Consider what He told Moses to tell Pharaoh: “I Am that I Am,” He said. “Tell them that I AM sent you.” (Ex. 4:13–14)
This was the name God chose for Himself. In two words, it encapsulates everything that God is:
He was not born, He Is.
He did not become, He Is.
He does not change, He Is.
In the beginning, God was, and He created the heavens and the earth.
And He began speaking. He continued speaking — to people, through people, around people. He went out of His way to break into the creation He spun from nothing and teach them who He was.
Eventually, the psalmist would write, “The sum of your word is Truth” (Psalm 119:160). The end result of the very Word of God is Truth. That’s what it adds up to, that’s what each part of it points toward.
What’s more amazing still is that this Word was there with God in the beginning (John 1:1). That this Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). This Word, now wrapped in flesh for a time, called Himself Truth (John 14:6).
Can you explain this business of the Word becoming flesh? Can you fathom how this Jesus could be both fully God and fully man? Could you describe the Trinity, the holy mystery of three-in-one?
We can try. But we fall short.
And that’s okay.
St. Augustine wrote in On Christian Doctrine, “A person who is a good and true Christian should recognize that Truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found.”
Years later, CS Lewis would write, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”
Truth is God’s truth, wherever you find it. Even if you don’t understand it. Where the Believer is wrong, God Himself comes to shatter untruth and replace it with Himself.
Regardless of if you can know it, you can know the One who calls Himself Truth — this same man who stood before Pilate and declared His purpose for coming to earth: to bear witness to it.
The same man who stood on a shore in Galilee and answered Peter’s incessant questioning about what was coming next by saying, “Peter, Stop. That is not for you to know yet. As for you, instead of doing all of that other stuff, instead of trying to justify doctrine, instead of trying to prove something that is impossible, instead of trying to rationalize everything, you follow Me.” (John 21:22, paraphrased)
We can grapple with Truth if we want. We can try to reason our way to it or brute force a way to discern it. But before we do any of that, we must look up and see that Truth Himself is still reaching out His hand toward you and saying the same thing He has said this whole time:
Follow Me. Then you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.
