Reason 101: What is Truth? – The Washington Standard
Standing before Pontius Pilate, Jesus said He had come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Pilate answered, “What is truth?” (John 18:37–38). It’s a question worth sitting with.
One common definition confidently defines truth as that which corresponds to reality. But whose reality? If two drivers give conflicting accounts of the same wreck, they may both be sincere. The question is what actually happened. And to answer it, we have to ask who says, how do they know, and what makes their testimony reliable?
Every truth claim is an appeal to some authority. “I saw it myself” appeals to the reliability of the senses. “The evidence points this way” appeals to reason. Even the man who says, “There’s no such thing as truth,” expects you to accept his statement as true. But Is that true? Yes , and his claim contradicts itself.
Dr. Greg Bahnsen took the argument a step further in his 1985 debate with prominent atheist Gordon Stein. “The transcendental proof for God’s existence is that without Him it is impossible to prove anything.”
Consider what we take for granted whenever we reason. We trust that our senses reliably tell us something about the world. We expect the laws of logic to hold whether we’re in Georgia or on the other side of the moon. And we rely on induction every time we expect what we’ve learned from past experience to tell us something about what will happen tomorrow. What makes those expectations reasonable in the first place?
Scripture purports to be a self revelation of an infinite, eternal, morally perfect, self-sufficient, unchangeable, supreme, personal spirit Being and Creator of all things. Further, This Being, who we refer to as God, Created humans with the capacity to not only understand and fulfil a designed role within the physical universe, but with the spiritual capacity to have a relationship with their Maker. Thus this God, Himself is the necessary precondition for intelligibility.
A skeptic may say science and the Bible are at odds. But a scientist assumes the same conditions will produce the same result, and that measurements are reliable, Precisely because the universe is Intelligently and purposely ordered to be so. Science is possible precisely because what Scripture declares about reality is true. The God who made the world sustains it, and He made us capable of studying it (Colossians 1:16–17).
An atheist can count, Based on a purely materialistic, evolutionary worldview, he cannot account for why he can count. He may reject the Bible is true, but he can only argue against the Bible because it’s true.
Christians know the truth as a divine person, the eternal Logos, Jesus Christ.
Article posted with permission from Bill Evans