Truth v. Fact

Truth isn't a concept, truth is a person -- the big JC. Short of a truth event on that order, and relying on the human intellect as intelligible to itself as a starting point it's not really possible to have a "truth". One of the big philosophical problems with a secular concept of truth is even more practical: technically speaking, you would have to exhaustivley define who George Bush is order to make sure that there weren't more than one "George Bush".

The overblown myth of divinity surrounding a human being whose existence is based on an unclear degree of historical fact is the definition of Truth? Guess that's more of your magically powerful "presupposition" working overtime again.

That's opinion, not fact, and can hardly be construed as the truth.

The first point about JC is a distortion of the terms in which we are applying the word 'truth' and as such is not admissable in this discussion - it is in any case a belief and not necessarily even a majority one. Subject to analysis by Cartesian methods the statement even transcends the nonsensical and it would be an embarrassment to dignify it with further consideration.

Your point about Bush is more interesting however and I would agree with you and disagree with the thread starter: it is not indisputable (actually nothing is) but further, it is demonstrably wrong in the sense that it is taken as implying.

Here is why: the statement "George Bush is President of the USA" rests on a supposition that is held to be universally recognized: ie that someone called George Bush exists.

Whilst I do not dispute this, I would argue that 'George Bush' is not one cohesive whole but an amalgam of disparate personalities with differing levels of development, different ways of acting and reacting and different tastes, preoccupations etc. This is the case with all of us unfortunately, but in Bush's case I'm afraid it is extended to the level of the sociopathic (imo).

There is no one stable 'George Bush', ergo he cannot be the President. It is a non sequtur.

Cool, then John Kerry is president?

Politically speaking, you may be more right than wrong, there.

I have to say that this is one of the most creative methods I have seen to start a Bush-hating thread.

You know...the existence of Jesus is not really questioned by anyone of any reasonable education in the subject these days.

Of course His divinity is always questioned.

Of course, you don't define whether the existance of Jesus is a physical reality, or a spiritual reality. Im quite happy with the latter, but the first is absolutely bull if you are defining the life of the physical Jesus as he appears in the gospels of pagan sun-worship.

Or perhaps you're being a sneak, in throwing words around that would imply to the naive, the evidence that shows that there was someone named Jesus alive in the 1st Century (absolutely for certain) was the same Jesus as the gospels narrate. For instance - there are 19 named Jesus' known to Josephus + the one obvious interpolated forgery. Including one that was crucified but is known not to be JC, so tell me Mr Cuilla, which one was the divine one?

Of course, as St Paul implies, and many other Christian figures have shown, it's always good and righteous to tell lies for the favour of god.

Why don't you stop lying to us and yourself, you (nor dmz) are not at all interested in establishing any truth, whatever that might be, but are simply living out a sadomasochistic urge of selfish self comfort and hypocricy.

It won't make the slightest bit of difference to the truth even if you managed to convince everyone on the planet to accept your lie.

I was speaking of the physical existence of a man named Jesus in and about the areas and times spoken of in the NT.


Not at all.


I am not lying about anything. Stop it.


Whatever.

Like I added, there are 19 of them in Josephus' account and 1 forgery, so to imply there was a bloke called Jesus about the 'right time' of the gospel mythos being a real person therefore the Bible must be a real historical account is rather lame.

Facts are accurate pieces of information. Truth can only be achieved when ALL of the relevant facts have been considered and accurately interpreted.

My 2¢: facts are essentially statements that are absolutely correct at specific given times - though not necessarily all times. In essence they are a subset of truth: ie to be a fact something must also be true.

Truth is something else because it operates partly in the realm of metaphysics, it is more abstract than mere facts but as stated before can encompass them, however it can be (and often is) relative - an attribute which is not possessed by facts.

Okay...I'll be more precise (and then drop it to get back on topic). The Jesus as described in the NT the Jesus. His (physical) existence is not really questioned by reputable scholars on the subject.

Can you provide more context of what you're getting at? It seems to me that a fact is a rather narrow piece of empirical information. The truth is deeper or broader. You could state a fact and yet misrepresent the broader truth. I think.

Even the 'cleaned up' version of Josphus' description of Jesus is a big plus for his existence. The Gosples supply their own evidence as well, as well as Luke's continuing narrative in the Acts of the Apostles. Then there are also the persecutions beginning with Nero IIRC, to consider, and the apparent connection of the Apostle John with the early Church.

of course not.

ROTFLMAO x infinity.

OK, I had better take another month off, I'd forgotten how much debating with the mentally ill can suck the life out of a guy.

bye.

The mentally ill? I don't agree with Cuilla's version of Christianity nor his view that Jesus was divine, but you haven't exactly made a clear case for anything.

I am starting to think that my time being banned was better than now.

Things haven't change much here. Rational discussions go ad hominem in short order and everything is down hill from there. Sad really.

Just out of curiosity...what is "Cuilla's version of Christianity"?

P.S. I thank you for your respectful disagreement.

My wife thinks I'm crazy half the time, does that count?

Back to the point though, I think the biggest, most important step for approaching the notion of 'truth' from a secular prespective is to decide if the human intellect is intelligible to itself on a individual basis, or wether it participates in something bigger that decides in varying degrees, what is preceived. There isn't really any way to move forward until you decide on that.

You know, the right-wing nutter type.

Riiighhht. Whatever. I thought you actually knew what I believed. EDIT: Or I suppose that "right-wing nutter type" is just some broad characterization of someone that believes the Bible, believes what it teaches and speaks, and believes in Jesus Christ (as a savior...not just a man).

P.S. I see the big grin...but still not sure you are not serious. Message boards are such a low-bandwidth communication medium.

Like many words, the words "truth" and "fact" aren't strictly defined. If you're looking for any single, clear-cut answer I don't think you'll find one.

I think it's fair to say that the word "fact" generally applies to narrower, more concrete, more easily objectifiable assertions, while "truth" is broader, dealing more with conclusions or syntheses drawn from a broader context, perhaps from a collection of supposed "facts".

We toss these words around very casually and interchangeably, however: "Were you, as you claimed, at home all evening on the night of the 15th?"

"Yes, that's the truth."

There's nothing wrong with that last sentence. Yet, in the context of a court trial, establishing the truth regarding someone's whereabouts at an important time would merely be a matter of establishing one of the facts which help lead, hopefully, to a broader truth of innocence or guilt.

The words "innocence" and "guilt" are also, of course, slippery words. We might clearly and undeniably establish with a mountain of evidence that Alice pointed a gun a Bob, pulled the trigger, and ultimately fired a bullet which was the cause of Bob's death. That said, is Alice guilty of killing Bob? Well, was it dark and Alice thought Bob was a burglar? Was Bob threatening Alice with a weapon at the time? Did Alice think the gun she held wasn't loaded? Was Alice, while not in immediate physical danger, so traumatized and threatened by Bob, and so afraid that the police and legal system wouldn't protect her or her children from Bob, that in a moment of great stress and fear she felt she had no other escape?

Different people are going to accept different types and degrees of justification for such a killing, which will lead to different views on the "truth" of whether or not Alice is guilty, innocent, or in some gray area in between.

I don't take such fuzziness, however, as many seem to do, to mean that the truth itself is a matter of personal perspective. I don't think we should confuse the difficulty of defining what we mean by "guilty" with whether or not it's true that someone is guilty of a particular act. It can be simultaneously true that Alice is guilty of killing Bob by Carol's definition of "guilt", and not guilty by Don's definition.

After all, most of us wouldn't insist that varying acceptance of the statement "chocolate is delicious" poses any baffling epistemological or ontological challenges. The enjoyment of chocolate, or lack thereof, is merely a matter of perspective. To insist that there is some ultimate Yes/No truth to the question, "Is chocolate delicious?", as if there's some Platonically ideal answer to that question, seems pretty silly. Rather than say that truth about the tastiness of chocolate is personal, I'd say it's not at all personal, but merely that the real, objective truth is very complicated and detailed, as complicated and detailed as the sum total of all reactions anyone ever has or will have to chocolate. There isn't a different "truth" for each person, each person simply possesses one facet of a larger true picture.

Of course, when it comes to something more important than confectionary predilections, like innocence or guilt in a case of murder, I think a lot of people long for the simplicity and comfort that there's a single, ultimately authoritative right answer "out there", and that a search for that truth is a matter of discovery -- and not, as I see it, a matter which also includes the very subjective element of deciding what we mean by saying that a person is "guilty".

Google provides hours of reading enjoyment

As does Wikipedia if you don't get too circular

Or you could just cite selected gems from Carl Sagan

The Truth is also apparently a guy named Carl

Then there's the whole question of who you prefer... Fox Mulder or Joe Friday... hmmm

Woah there pardner. I was joking in my "nutter" comment, hence the smiley. My first comment about versions of Christianity was not meant to be pejorative either. I'm just assuming that we don't agree on "the truth" about Christianity (or is it the facts?), though to be honest I don't really know that for sure.

This goes back to my earlier point, even scientific observations are. most of the time, not exhaustively defined. Most "scientific observations" are placeholders for something that is in process.

We don't exhaustivley define or observe much of anything. In fact, the mantra of science is to always be becoming, or always seeking to exceed the bounds of what has been previously observed -- which is science's track record. There are some constants, some equations that are printed on laminated cards, but they are only working titles of what we don't exhaustivley know.

This is essentially dealing not with 'truth' or 'fact', just with 'what works'.

"truth" is the relationship between belief and reality.

A fact is a unit of truth.

Fair enough. I apologize. So many folks here jump to conclusions about what so and so believes/thinks. I guess I did the same thing in this case. Sorry.

Bingo. Give the man a free taco.

Considering the very dysfunctional relationship a lot of people have there, I'm not sure if that's what I'd want to call "truth".

If "believes the Bible" means takes the Bible, or any other so-called "Holy Book" as literally true, then I think the word "nutter" applies quite well. Barking at the moon mad.

The fact that this form of insanity is all too common in our world merely makes it more tragic. I don't view it as any less severe a break from reality simply because so many suffer from this particuler sort of malady, and because they some how, while making things miserable for the rest of us, manage to lead what might be called almost normal lives.

Well said.

The problem with people such as you describe is not so much what they believe - anyone is entitled to believe hat they like - but the fact that they 'downgrade' others who do not adhere to their beliefs.

This 'downgrading' can range from simple shunning, common or garden prejudice (and in extreme cases racism) to, in truly advanced cases, attempts to convert those not of their mindset and demonize/kill as a last resort should that fail.

This is why such matters are both dangerous and highly important to address. We need zero tolerance for it.

And before anyone's antennae start revolving like a Chinook rotor blade in a sandstorm, I am not just talking of Christians here but extremists and literalists of all religions. They're all the same.

Back on topic: Most people know the model of Schroedinger's Cat in quantum physics - a cat is in a sealed box with a glass of poisonous gas.

According to a conventional outside observer asked to comment without opening the box the cat is in one of two states - alive (if it the poison vial is intact) or dead if it has broken the container.

It would therefore be true to say that the statement 'the cat is either alive or dead' is true. Only it isn't - it is false. Quantum physics teaches that the cat is in neither state and that is the act of an observer actively observing the cat that determines its state.

Therefore truth is variable. For example - in the middle ages, had someone conducted an experiment similar to Schroedinger's then the statement about the dead or alive cat would have been true - as far as the knowledge of science at that time knew.

Of course it was not objectively 'true' as we now know - and this strongly implies that our knowledge now is not objectively 'true' either and will be superceded in generations to come.

Truth may well be something we can never know - it may even be something that does not exist.

The Muslim folk figure Mulla Nasrudin (whose sayings are often used in illustrating strange concepts in Quantum mechanics teaching situations) when asked the question 'what is truth?' replied "truth is something I never speak nor shall I". That seems a pretty good description - maybe truth is God, in Islam and some Middle Eastern Christian sects this is the meaning of both terms.

See my post here on the subject of biblical literalism. You seem to be falling into the same simplistic trap on this matter as so many do.

This is almost laughable. Poor you...your life is made miserable because of the beliefs of others.

Chris, in your opinion, do there exist any Christians who are literalist in their interpretation of the Bible?

Yes (including me)...actually not just opinion but experience too...but...have you read my post on this matter?