What is Truth?

Commentary for Michigan Radio November, 1997

I read somewhere that 70% of Generation X'ers believe there is no such thing as absolute truth.

So the other day I was speaking to a group of students and I said, "So is it true -- that you don't believe in truth?"

I don't know; I thought it was kind of funny -- but all I got was blank stares.

Considering what absolute truths give rise to these days -- fanaticism, terrorism, suicide cults -- truth is handled like a hazardous material -- and maybe that's a good thing. But for those of us who still dare to pray or worship, it's also a little troubling. Do we say our creeds with our fingers crossed? Do we end our prayers with a "Whatever" instead of an "Amen?"

Most definitions of the term "absolute truth" include ideas like "beyond doubt," "not relative." But I think absolute truth has less to do with its degree of certainty than with our degree of commitment to it. I mean, I am certain that if I get hit in the head with a brick, it's gonna hurt; but it hardly deserves the term "absolute truth". On the other hand, I might say that the presence of God is an absolute truth for me, even if I'm not 100% certain of it -- because I'm willing to devote my life to its possibility.

An absolute truth is something worthy of devotion; something with the power to overthrow the tyranny of our own self hood.

It is our deification of the self that leads us to treat the idea of absolute truth as a kind of heresy; our worship is in the temple of the self; our culture is a cult of consumption, feeding our hungry gods with the stuff of shopping malls and mail order catalogues. Starved for meaning, we gorge on the empty calories of self-fulfillment.

And now the holidays approach; the annual orgy of consumption begins; and our souls again go hungry.

30 years ago, the percentage of college students who thought it was important to find a meaningful philosophy of life was 83% -- that number now is 43%; meanwhile the desire to make a lot of money has risen from 43% to 78%. Making money is the single highest goal of today's college students. And the suicide rate among teenagers and young adults has tripled during the same period. Any coincidence?

To use Victor Frankl's terms, our will to meaning has given way to a will to power and a will to pleasure. We are suspicious of truths that threaten our pleasure or power; and when we do search for meaning we turn inward, feeding on our own yearnings, free from the constraints that our wisdom traditions might impose.

This is why universities are in a way like houses of worship -- places of spiritual nurture; because despite our post modern objections, universities continue to promote dialogue and debate -- impossible without a belief in something which, for lack of a better word, we might call truth.

Universities, when true to their mission, dare to challenge the supremacy of the self, offering in its place the sobering but liberating possibility that our selves are but specks of dust; our cravings and desires only cogs in a cultural selling machine that offers us everything we need... except the elements of a life worth living: love, meaning, and truth.

Cardinal Newman once said that "A University is... an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry or a mint, or a treadmill."

The University fulfills its mission when it embraces its spiritual calling; whether we be seeking the truth; or simply collecting the facts, the truth will out; saving us, in the end, from our selves.



The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology