Truth: How Things Are

1. If truth exists, there is a way things are.
2. If truth does not exist, there is a way things are (that truth does not exist).
3. Therefore, there is a way things are (truth) by necessity.


A minority of people occasionally claims that truth itself does not exist, a mere social construct or comforting idea instead of immutable reality.  But the very act of denying truth only proves that it exists by logical necessity--for to say there is no truth is to say that it is true that no truth exists.  Only the most foolish of persons would even consider this position to be correct.  Truth is how things are; no one can rationally dispute this definition without lapsing into contradiction (e.g. "The way things are is that truth is not the way things are").

For instance, it is true that my mind exists.  Now, I could be a mind whose only body is a brain stimulated by a malevolent and deceitful scientist into imagining all of my sensory experiences even though they do not correspond to the real external world where the scientist resides [1].  I may have a body quite anatomically and physiologically different than the one I can look down at and see right now.  However, whether I am in the Matrix being drained of my energy by sentient robots or a disembodied mind in a vat being deceived by a scientist or the world I perceive is the true external world, my mind exists and I know this for sure.  There is no possible way I could be wrong about this.  To doubt this fact is one of the greatest irrationalities I could engage in, one of the greatest of follies.  Another error of equal irrationality would be to deny that truth exists, for I would be arguing that in reality there is no such thing as reality.  People can rationally doubt if they know certain facts about how things ultimately are, just as people can doubt if the information received by their senses is accurate, but to claim that there is no way things ultimately are is like doubting that one even possesses the senses feeding one information--it is an incoherent, impossible absurdity.

Even if very little about reality can be presently known, reality objectively exists independent of our awareness of it or how we wish it to be.  This represents one of the most rationally undeniable of fact, one that no one can attack without contradicting their own argument at the deepest possible level, dissolving away the very foundations of any possible ideological opposition.  Truth and knowledge of it stand as the only things that can deliver us from ignorance and falsity; they alone can secure this enlightenment.  But truth may often prove far more terrifying to our hearts and more foreign to our expectations than we are willing to grant.  I myself have discovered after three years of the most skeptical and rationalistic investigations that there are truths unavoidable, undeniable, and irrefutable.  My own existence and the impossibility for me to exist and not exist at the same time in the same universe (law of non-contradiction) rank among these.  But I have been forced by my reflections to confront my own inability to learn the answers to many questions ("Am I in a simulation?"; "Does God have a specific plan for my individual life?"; "What are God's reasons for withholding moral or theological information in the Bible?"; "Is there a multiverse?"; "Are there lost books which are divinely-inspired and also belong in the Bible?"; "Does extraterrestrial life exist?", etc) due to epistemological limitations which, hopefully, are temporary, and this can sporadically bring me to more despair over what I do not know more than to joy at what I do know for sure.

I will join Descartes, Plato, Saint Augustine, and all of those in human history who have resigned their hopes to the realm of truth even if that truth will ultimately defy many or all of their expectations.  Whether I will find myself shocked, vindicated, terrified, or astonished at how aspects of reality turn out, I would rather pursue and attach myself to truth and what I can and do know for sure than satisfy myself with pleasant or personally-comforting delusions and assumptions.  The truth may result in either my excitement or my condemnation, but it is inescapably futile and pointless to attempt to live for anything other than it.

Truth will force itself on me and any other sentient being in the end; no one can escape the very fabric of reality.  A theist may die and find in the afterlife a very different deity than he or she expected; an atheist may realize after death that a deity exists with revulsion and horror; a Christian may discover that there is no such thing as meaning despite the existence of an uncaused cause, or that God does not actually love the human species; a person may see his or her entire worldview collapse due to epistemological faults and catapult that person into a terrifying existential crisis.  There is no such thing as a total, perpetual escape from truth.  It will in the end inevitably, incontrovertibly force itself on me.  My response to this awareness has been to orient the entirety of my conscious life around the pursuit of truth and reason as best I can.  Although this may prove meaningless in the end, any other approach to living is futile already.


[1].  See here:
A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/brain-in-vat.html
B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/brain-in-vat-reality-remains-unchanged.html