Truth and Fiction
What is truth? It is the most difficult of questions, that has plagued us since the dawn of civilisation. Wars have been fought over it; cities have been burned to the ground in its name; armies have been slaughtered. Because the truth is power: power over who you are, what you think, and how you respond. Are you building a better society, or are you building a prison? Are you fighting in the name of God, or are you in it for the money? The truth determines our world view, and it is no wonder that so many have died in its name.
Even today’s world is dominated by these wars, be it in a different medium. It’s the war of ideas. Ideas about who may vote, who gets what money, and what punishments should be given to those that misbehave. Fake news is the new weapon of choice; a name to be given to anything that doesn’t suit our beliefs. Whether or not facts really contradict each other does not matter. It is the impact that matters. The emotion that goes with it. The way it appeals to what you feel is right. Never before has there been such a brutal force fighting over what you think.
The Origins of Truth
We’re all subjected to the same principle: we believe our own truth to be the right truth. After all, it’s the one we have to live by. Your beliefs are crafted out of millions of experiences that define who you are. What school you went to, which company you worked for, who you married, … All these things define who you are, and — consciously or unconsciously — lead you to certain judgements. If you were fired multiple times while you gave everything you had, you may start to think that something’s wrong with the system. It you got very wealthy, working day and night to make your company a success, you might be led to believe the system works flawlessly. Neither is right or wrong, and yet we are easily convinced it is.
Our personal truth justifies the way we exist. If it didn’t, it would be impossible to act with confidence in a rapidly changing world.
Our search for truth began with the development of language. The famous painting The Tower of Babel depicts humankind in search for heavenly truth by building a structure that could reach it. Eventually, God, who was rightfully upset for humans to be so bold, intervened by meddling with the tongues of the workers, in such a way that they no longer could understand one another. The people spread out, and, being unable to understand each other, waged wars, had conflicts, and weren’t able to unite. The tower of Babel is a symbol for human language and for its pretension to reach heaven. It translates to “confusion” in modern English, which gets a bit ironic when looking at today’s world.
It used to be different. In medieval Europe, a lot of time and energy was directed into proving the existence of God. These theologians believed that by using nothing more than logic, mathematics and the Bible, a definite proof of the divine could be given. Isaac Newton, for instance, spent much more time studying the Bible than he did writing his famous Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one of the most important scientific works ever written. The reason these practices no longer exist at this scale today is in part due to philosophical developments a century later, which in turn led Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words in the 19th century.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Nietzsche’s words resound till this day. Is our post-truth world a natural consequence of us killing the divine? Did our tongues become split from one another, to be forever stuck in our own little filter bubble? It’s an interesting thought; but one that I cannot answer.
Beliefs and Facts
A simple fact that remains true irrespective of the era one lives in, is that you can never prove nor disprove the existence of God. When Kant made his magnum opus about the limits of philosophical knowledge, he wrote:
I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.
What he meant, in simple words, was that believing really is believing: there’s nothing that can prove to you that there really is a God, and trying to prove it would get you nowhere, because it would become knowledge and not belief. Ultimately, your personality and life experiences will influence wether you believe there’s a God, and somehow it is very strange, to think that, 1000 years from now, humans will still have the same questions about God as we have had for the past couple of centuries.
Even things that are far less a matter belief still are. Science is a systematic method to build models of the things we perceive in daily life. It’s a story. A very detailed and complex one for sure, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the world that is the final truth. All models are approximations of reality. They are incredibly useful to make sense of our surroundings, but will never show us why things are. The simple reason is that one can always find a different story that explains the same results, no matter how complex. The spinning of the Earth? “It’s a turtle, carrying the entire planet”, the Hindu priests said thousands of years ago. Quantum entanglement? “It’s a simulation”, the stereotypical Silicon Valley computer geek proclaims.
A wise man once said that he knows nothing, and that he knows this to be the truth above all else. There’s always room for doubt, and no-one can convince you to change your beliefs. What matters most is what beliefs we choose to follow to make the world a better place, and which ones we don’t. In an age where advertisements and clever political campaigns are able to influence more and more of your beliefs, this has never been so important.
Like what you read, or found a mistake? Just leave a comment below to let me know! Inspiration stikes at unpredictable times, so if you want the latest articles you can always follow me here on Medium or on Twitter. Oh, and you might like our brand-new Facebook page with the latest articles delivered straight to your newsfeed!
