Greg Koukl and Jeff Myers challenge postmodern skepticism, arguing that our use of language and awareness of morality inherently affirm that truth is real and knowable.
Transcript
Greg: Since there’s this, kind of, anguish or angst about the possibility of knowing truth—even among Christians who hold on to truth in some sense, but with maybe a high degree of uncertainty and therefore the angst—you’ve talked about some of the reasons we can believe or be confident that truth can be known. Can you offer some of those thoughts here? What are some of the tools that help us out?
Jeff: Well, there are a lot of good books that talk about this, so I just try to summarize. But one thing is that truth rises. If someone says there is no truth, then they’re proclaiming the existence of a truth. It’s not even possible to say truth is not knowable without proclaiming that there is a truth that you can know. It could just be a trick of language, but it does seem that truth rises whenever we try to even deny its existence.
The second thing is there’s a knowable relationship between words and the things and ideas to which they refer. If I talk about a chair, the word “chair” is not the same thing as a chair, but we can reliably use that word because the things and ideas to which we refer have essences that project themselves back to us. So, we can have a conversation. If someone says there’s no such thing as truth, and people who proclaim truth always do things that are unjust, well, wait a second. What is justice? If there’s no such thing as truth, there’s no such thing as justice. “Justice” is just another word. But, if words can reliably refer to things, then we can have a conversation.
If someone says, “I disagree with you,” then they’re actually saying that they believe there is some kind of a truth that is knowable. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even bother to say it because words would have no meaning.
Greg: They wouldn’t be able to disagree because to disagree is to say that you’re wrong and I’m right, which trades on the notion of truth.
Jeff: Even if they’re just saying, “I have a different perspective, and I need you to hear it,” they’re still saying, “I have a perspective of something.” So, ideas and things and the relationship of words—that’s knowable.
A third thing is the relationship between facts and opinions. A lot of people today in the postmodern world are saying there really aren’t any facts. It’s all opinion. It’s all perception. Even the facts of the physical world—time, space, distance, and so forth—are all relative to our own perceptions. But we know this isn’t actually the case. If I were to say, “Hey, did you know that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level?” you might say, “Well, it depends on atmospheric conditions.” But you wouldn’t say, “Well, that’s your opinion.” The same with historical facts. When I say Martin Luther King was shot on April 4, 1968, it wouldn’t be appropriate for someone to say, “Well, maybe in your culture that’s true, but not in mine.” So, we know that there are facts that exist.
Well, then, what about moral facts? That’s where people start to say, okay, well, there are no moral facts, just opinions. But we know the difference between caring for an animal and torturing an animal, and we know that it’s not just a word choice. There is an actual difference between those things.
Greg: Most people know that.
The big thing for me—and I’ll say this because it’s a bit of a shocker, but there’s a point here—is that, as a Christian apologist, I love the problem of evil. The reason I love it is not because I love evil, but the problem of evil is something that everybody’s aware of, no matter where they live or when they lived. The complaint that they have is that evil is real and objective. So, if morals are just relative to one’s own experience, there can’t be a problem of evil. There can only be some things people like and other people don’t like, and that’s all you can say about it.
What occurred to me, also, in a very simple way is this. You can actually test the world to find out whether your views are true. You got on board here because you got an email that had a link that you could click. So, there was an implicit claim there. You push this button and click it, you’ll see Koukl’s face here before too long, and we’ll have a chat. And then you pushed it, and there I was, which means that your belief about the link was actually true. It was accurate. These are the kind of things we do all the time, and we don’t even think about it. In fact, if we couldn’t know what was true, we’d be dead in a day. Our life depends on getting certain things accurately in the world.