The Pursuit of Truth

Pontius Pilate approved one of the most notorious state-sanctioned crimes in history.  But he is also famous for another quip he made in his private discussion with Jesus.  After Christ speaks about coming to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissively retorts, “What is truth?”

It is one of those scriptures that philosophers use to show how the bible makes reference to classic philosophical questions.  Ironically, they prefer not to notice that Jesus seems to ignore the question.  =)  But the concept of truth is an even more loaded question today. 

“Well ‘your truth’ is different than ‘my truth.’”

“Truth is just what I decide for myself.”

Those who believe there is an objective quality to truth are labelled ‘narrow-minded’ or even worse ‘bigots.’  There is nothing outside of me, many say, which determines whether my beliefs are true or false.

Bertrand Russell, who is no friend of Christianity, had something very different to say.  In a 1912 work titled Problems of Philosophy, he argues:

“But, as against what we have just said, it is to be observed that the truth or falsehood of a belief always depends upon something which lies outside the belief itself.  If I believe that Charles I died on the scaffold, I believe truly, not because of any intrinsic quality of my belief, which could be discovered by merely examining the belief, but because of an historical event which happened two and a half centuries ago.  If I believe that Charles I died in his bed, I believe falsely: no degree of vividness in my belief, or of care in arriving at it, prevents it from being false, again because of what happened long ago, not because of any intrinsic property of my belief.  Hence, although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal quality of the beliefs.”

I wonder whether if Pilate understood ‘truth’ in the classic sense Bertrand Russell does, he would have seen the irony in his question.  As Andreas J. Kӧstenberger says, “Ironically, the one charged with determining the truth in the matter [of Jesus’ guilt] dismisses the relevance of truth… in the very presence of the one who is truth incarnate.”

The farther I step away from the academic world, the more I sense questions like Pilates are more intended to undermine honest inquiry, not to assist in the pursuit of it –even in the academy.  The subjective call for open-mindedness today demands the opposite of what they espouse.  Honest inquiry with an open mind assumes I could be wrong.  It assumes truth is out there to be searched for and found.  But if truth is whatever I decide it to be, I can never be wrong.  It undermines honest inquiry.  As Cunningham says below, it is the very definition of a closed mind.