What Has Happened to Truth?
Back in the 80s, I was working on my journalism degree. Rumors circulated that newspapers would eventually be replaced by digital media, so I chose broadcast journalism.
I was taught that a reporter should just report the facts, grab a soundbite from each side of the story, and not involve my own opinion. I was taught to report the facts and remain neutral, letting the listener discern the truth. We still thought that truth mattered, not our judgments. Or at least I did.
It wasn’t long into my first and only job as a reporter at a news radio station that I became disillusioned. I honestly thought reporting was a career that helped people see the truth. In some ways it is, but in other ways, it is just a business. Certain stories were told, and others were left out or barely mentioned, because we need to keep the advertisers happy. They paid the bills.
I am glad that I got out of the news business because the field has been largely corrupted.
Postmodernist thinking crept into academia, then seeped into journalism. The model I was trained on morphed into the idea that news is a personal narrative. “Just the facts” became more interpretive, and soon we all knew which news agency reflected a certain bias.
Interestingly, this idea of no absolute truth is not new, although it has become much more pervasive. In the mid 1600s, a shift occurred from religion as the establisher of truth to science as the truth teller in the modern era. Critical of the church, rational thinkers used reasoning over the soul (heart). Natural philosophers began to discover that nature was regular or uniform, something testable and observable. They made great advances in mathematics and physics. They focused on the immediate and tended to disregard the eternal. Scientism, or the belief that science would ultimately answer all questions, became a new type of religion.
This reduced life to parts, calculations, methods, criticisms, and experimentation. This is a form of abstraction that, in due course, pointed to lawlessness and meaninglessness. Truth is no longer viewed as static. There are no apparent eternal laws.
If life has no meaning and no apparent lawgiver, then to whom are we ultimately accountable?
Pontius Pilate’s question – “What is truth?”
What is truth? Pontius Pilate asked Jesus this when deciding his fate. People today are still asking that question. There’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes) when it comes to human behavior… only new ways of saying it.
Today, we live in a post-truth mindset that claims there is NO absolute truth. And here’s the funny question we can then ask: “If there’s no absolute truth, is that true?” This is what is called a “self-defeating” statement. It contradicts itself because it is making a “truth claim.”
Yet navigating truth today has become one of the defining challenges of modern life. I grew up when seeing usually meant believing, hearing a voice implied a real speaker, photographs were strong evidence, and most false ideas spread slowly. Technology has changed all four of those assumptions.
Technology cannot change truth, though it can certainly distort it. Today, AI (artificial intelligence) can generate convincing videos, clone voices, fabricate documents, fake “eyewitness” images, write news articles using LLMs (large language models), manipulate statistics, and create entirely false online personalities!
So the question is no longer merely “Is this possible?” but: “What process should I use before I trust something?”
1. Stop trusting a single source.
One video, one screenshot, one headline, or one viral post should never be treated as final proof anymore. Instead, we should ask ourselves whether other sources can independently confirm something, whether multiple sources are reporting the same things, and whether credible institutions agree on the core facts.
2. Truth must now be established through a convergence of facts.
A single clip can be fake, but thousands of clips are harder to fabricate. But the sheer number of people repeating a claim does not make it true. Truth is better established by the union of independent evidence.
3. Pay attention to pleas of emotional manipulation.
The stronger the emotional pull, the more careful we should become. A useful internal warning sign is: “This content wants me emotionally activated before I think critically.” That doesn’t mean it’s false, but it means you should slow down to evaluate the information. We must train ourselves to ask about the raw facts and the assumptions being made. We need discerning minds in a world that often creates delusion. We need to be less trusting but not fall into total cynicism, throw up our hands, and declare that “Nothing is true!”
4. Calibrated Trust
The goal is not blind trust or total distrust. It needs to be “calibrated trust,” or “reasoned trust,” because some things are highly reliable, others are uncertain, and some are clearly deceptive. Wisdom is learning the difference. Take time to think things over; be comfortable with saying, “I don’t know yet.” That is not a weakness; it’s wisdom
We can determine truth, but we need wiser tools to do so. Learning some logic will help. There are ways to navigate truth in this confusing culture.
Seven points that help define truth:
1. Truth can be defined as “that which corresponds to its object” or “that which describes an actual state of affairs.” Contrary to relativism, which claims truth changes based on culture, if something is objectively true, it’s true for all people, at all times, in all places.
2. Truth is discovered, not invented. It exists independent of anyone’s knowledge of it. (i.e., gravity existed prior to Newton)
3. Truth is transcultural. If something is true, it is true for all people, in all places, at all times. (i.e. 2 + 2 = 4 for everyone)
4. Truth is unchanging. Our beliefs about truth may change (i.e., when we began to believe the earth was round instead of flat, the “truth” about the earth did not change, only our belief about it changed.)
5. Beliefs cannot change a fact (or truth), no matter how sincerely they are held. Someone can sincerely believe the world is flat, but that only makes that person sincerely mistaken.
6. Truth is not affected by attitudes.
- Just because an arrogant person states a truth, it does not make that truth false
- Nor does a humble person, who makes an error they profess true.
- The character of a person stating a truth claim does not change the truth of it.
7. All objective truths are absolute. And I am going to argue that ultimately, all truth comes from God.
In short, contrary beliefs are possible, but contrary truths are not possible. We can believe everything is true, but we cannot make everything true.
Law of Non-Contradiction – reasoning your way to truth
One of the Laws of Logic is called the law of non-contradiction. It states that contradictory ideas cannot both be true at the same time. You can use this to examine claims people often make that largely go unexamined. For example, the claim that “all religions are true.” This is religious pluralism, yet the world’s religions don’t agree on a lot of things.
1) Buddhism claims there is no personal god
2) Christianity claims there is a personal God, Jesus
3) Judaism claims Jesus was just “a man”
4) Islam claims Jesus was just another prophet who was not killed by crucifixion, nor did he resurrect
These all can’t be true! They can all be wrong, but it’s crazy to say they’re all correct! So, how can we know what is true?
It’s usually a good idea to clarify what you mean by certain words when it comes to truth statements. For instance, we have two kinds of truth: subjective and objective.
Subjective Truth
These are personal tastes (i.e., favorite flavor of ice cream), feelings, and opinions. These are not true for everyone.
Objective truth
This is a truth that transcends all of us. It’s true no matter where you live, who you are, or when you live (timeless). It is absolute, singular, and exclusive.
My car is a blue Honda CRV. That is an objective truth based on observation. But claims that Hondas are the best cars is a subjective truth.
Objective truth is true for everyone, whether they agree with it or not.
Today, many claim that morality, for example, depends on your personal perspective (subjective). This is a terrifying claim! The implications could be troubling. Yet today, we can see some of those consequences in our culture’s chaos because we have untethered ourselves from the truth. Our moral compass is not grounded in a transcendent source.
Where does your moral compass point —you or God?
Humanism focuses primarily on the individual, and specifically, on “individual autonomy” – man makes himself increasingly independent. This is where our Western culture has pointed its moral compass.
So what’s the big deal? I mean, why should we care if individuals want to do their own thing and find their own truth – what makes them happy? Then there is no unity among people, and no shared sense of what it means to be human: no unifying meaning or universals. This leaves us with a life of mechanics, where even the human being is seen as a machine.
Yet, secular humanists believe that humans, beginning only from themselves, can solve every problem. The cry of the humanist is: “I can do what I want, and what I will… just give me until tomorrow!” But people are finite.
“If you begin with that which is finite, no matter how far you project it, you can never come to an absolute – never.” Francis Schaeffer
God is infinite.
Truth can be known enough to be satisfied. Baruch Spinoza, in Ethics, said that “the human mind has adequate knowledge of God’s eternal, infinite essence.” In short, this 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher argues that we can know “enough” to be satisfied.
But what about those who state that we can’t know for sure?
Many believe that even if objective truth exists, you could never know it with certainty. Some claim we can’t trust our “human capacity” to know. Ideas that truth cannot be known are self-refuting (defeats itself). If certainty is impossible, are they “certain” about that? Again, this claim contradicts itself.
Three Ways to Assess Truth
- Empirically – using the 5 senses is one way. But is it entirely accurate? Sensory experience is often too personal to apply to everyone.
- Emotivist (our emotions) – How we feel is another way to assess truth. But our feelings are not always reliable.
- Corresponding Theory of Truth – Does what you believe line up with reality? This is perhaps the best way to assess the truth.
You need to ask yourself this: does the claim correspond to what is really there? Is the quality of evidence sufficient? A properly justified belief has enough evidence to support it.
Jesus is Truth
Jesus called Himself “The Truth.” (John 14:6) What did Jesus mean when he said that? Here are some meanings of that declaration.
- Jesus, being God, cannot lie (Num. 23:19; Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18)
- Jesus is the true representation of God and has been from the beginning – the root reality behind all things – the source of all things (Acts 17:24-25)
- Jesus, as the incarnate Word of God, is the source of all truth (John 1:1)
Truth is knowable, and it’s found in the person of Jesus Christ. This is where your ‘Moral Compass’ should point to — Jesus.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
“Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. For their sakes, I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.” (John 17:15-19)
“For I was very glad when brethren came and testified to your truth, that is, how you are walking in truth. I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth.”
(3 John 1:3-4)
“Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
The Bible also says that the “truth sets us free.” (John 8:31-31) Yet, look around you… So many people are living fragmented lives. Being disconnected from the truth has left many feeling anxious, as if there is no solid ground. As Christians, we can help others connect to the truth by helping them understand that truth is found in God. We can help those who are confused by false ideas.
Start where you can find common ground in the human experience. Gently share truth, as the Spirit leads. Paul says in Ephesians 4:15 to “speak the truth in love.”
Remember that the laws of logic are useful tools in discerning truth. God gave us reasoning skills for good reason! The Law of Non-contradiction is a great tool for combating contradictory ideas: they cannot both be true at the same time. Recall the difference between objective truth and subjective truth.
Finally, truth is knowable and personal: Jesus is truth, and all truth comes from God.
