Seeking the truth

In the ODT a couple of days ago, Educationalist Jeff Smith is reported as urging graduates to 'seek the truth, but also to follow "your own path" and strive to help others.' 

But the headline quotes him as saying 'follow own path' to truth, which was what caught my eye.  Apparently Prof Smith gave the graduates the same advice he gives his own children, 'Beware of people who know the truth.' Which presumably includes Prof Smith, so he added, 'pay attention to his advice only "if it rings true for you."'

Ah, the old postmodern proverb, 'What's true for you isn't necessarily true for me.'  It's touted as a tolerance point of view, but as we know, if anyone crosses those who follow this line, it's soon obvious that what is true for them is the truth.

Prof Smith carries on: 'In this world, people will profess to own a little corner of the truth, and sometimes they will try to convince you that your own life will be better if you follow their path. But you've got your own path to follow. It may take a bit of clearing at times...trying to see just where the path is taking you.'

Okay, so firstly, people in this world (I'm not sure what other world Prof Smith has experience of) will profess to own a little corner of the truth. Hmm. Nope, people profess to owning the truth, not just a little bit of it. That's why there is conflict. As for following a path that you have to clear, I'm sure it's all a metaphor, but according to Prof Smith we have to see where this path takes us. Just a minute, who laid out the path that we have to hack our way along?

The report ends with him saying, 'Your graduation today does not mean you've found the light at the end of the tunnel. It means you've found the tunnel.' Sensible enough comment. But the last line in the report says, 'the truth was "way down there somewhere."  Um?  Sorry, where are we talking about exactly? I'm lost in metaphors here...

What Prof Smith is talking about, I think, is having a philosophy of life. That isn't necessarily the same thing as searching for truth.  And as far as I can see it, truth, if the word is to mean anything, is truth, not what I might think is the truth.  Either a thing is true or it isn't. Truth is one of those words that's entirely itself and not something else. Whatever isn't truth is not the truth. Anything that we don't know is truth is speculation about the truth.

Truth is an objective thing, outside me. We've so bamboozled ourselves in the last hundred years or so with ideas that might or might not be the truth, that we don't know what the word really means anymore.  As far as I can see, you can bang your head against the truth as much as you like and say your truth is what you make it, but at the end of the day, the truth is the truth.

In this world, gravity is a particular truth (its rules are different in other worlds, but they still hold true). The truth that is gravity in our world will make sure that you fall heavily if you fall, and the farther you fall the worse it will be for you.  You can jump off high buildings if you like, expecting to overcome gravity, but all that will do is get your name in the Darwin Awards (where there are plenty of examples of truth doing its thing).

The idea that we should beware of people who 'know' the truth is in part the cause of much of the problem with education these days. Children are told to query those in authority, with the result that they learn nothing that is true, and plenty that's only half-truths. Outside school, they challenge authority at every point, though most of them eventually learn the truth that what authority says goes, like it or not. They soon learn that in the real world truth means working a full day, being honest in your dealings and a bunch of other things adults take for granted - after a bit of experience. You can buck against these 'truths' but in the end they come back to bite you.

The graduates Prof Smith was talking to will discover this too, probably sooner than they'll discover what's down that path they're going to hack their way along. But they'll discover the truth more quickly if they listen to people who've already been around a while, ones who've thought about the truth for a few decades, and have managed to get a grip on it, rather than those who blithely say that what is true for you may not be true for me. Ignoring what people have already learned throughout history and trying to start from scratch is a very slow process, and a very long, dark tunnel.

Update: 
An article detailing another address has appeared in the ODT since I wrote the above. Intriguingly, the speaker in this address, Sir Peter Gluckman, says that science by itself is not the answer.  I could name a number of people who think that science is the answer to everything, so it's good to see someone with the kudos of Sir Peter be forthright about this. 

One of his statements was paraphrased in this way: The processes of science were designed to develop 'relatively reliable knowledge about the natural, built and social worlds.' The only other sources of knowledge were ultimately those of 'belief or dogma' but science alone could not create policy decisions or in medicine or public health, he warned. And science itself was 'never complete.'

I think there may be an unnecessary 'or' between policy decisions and in medicine.

I'm famous cos God loves me

Before they were famous, many of the biggest pop stars in the world believed that God wanted them to be famous, that this was his plan for them, just as it was his plan for the rest of us not to be famous. Conversely, many equally talented but slightly less famous musicians I’ve interviewed felt their success was accidental or undeserved—and soon after fell out of the limelight.

As I compiled and analyzed these interviews for my new book, I reached a surprising conclusion: Believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous. Of course, from the standpoint of traditional theology, even in the Calvinistic world of predestination, God is much more concerned with the fate of an individual’s soul than his or her secular success, and one’s destiny is unknowable. So what’s helping these stars is not so much religion as belief - specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else.

From “God at the Grammys: The Chosen Ones” by Neil Strauss.

Norris on Stafford

Kathleen Norris (in her book, Amazing Grace, pg 78) quotes William Stafford...."who once said that he never had writer's block, because when a poem failed to come, he simply lowered his standards and accepted whatever came along."

He also said: "Successful people cannot find poems, for you must kneel down and explore for them." Norris writes that she decided this applied to religious belief as well as to poetry.

Death

I've been reading a book on death and dying lately, The Undertaking. It's by Thomas Lynch; he's both an undertaker and a poet. The book looks at death in detail, and from a number of intriguing angles. I'm going to copy a few extracts from the book into this blog soon, since not only can Mr Lynch write very stylishly, he has a lot of good things to say about his topic.

Why read about death? Well, as you get older, and find you've outlived more and more people, you know that somewhere along the line, there's more than a distinct possibility that you will join them at some point. So it's useful to think about it a bit more seriously.

When you're young, you think death is so far in the future that it's not worth thinking about, or else that death is an impossibility. It could never happen to me. I suspect that more than a few young suicides think that killing themselves isn't actually a real thing; they'll wake up in the morning and carry on with their lives like they have for the last 16-20 years.

We all think like that, in a way. Unless there are definite and even disturbing signs otherwise, we all climb out of bed in the morning not in the least surprised that we have another day up our sleeves. But lurking in the back of our minds - our 65-year-old minds, anyway - is the knowledge that like it or not, we ain't gonna be here forever. It's scary, strange, uninviting, and hard to grasp. 'Death pulls towards acute dimensions' says Les Murray in one of his poems, by which I take it he means that death sharpens the mind considerably in regard to the things of this world - all that stuff we're so familiar with.

Check out the next post for an extract from Lynch.

Photo courtesy of ThomasLynch.com

Reductio ad absurdum

David Hart, in First Things is surprised - or perhaps not surprised - at the lack of thinking in a book, 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Here's a couple of paragraphs in which he describes some of the contributions:

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors. Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

Reality, truth, morals, values et al

Reading more of Fabric of Faithfulness, and noted this quote from Steve Turner's poem, Creed on the World.

We believe that each man must find the truth that

is right for him.

Reality will adapt accordingly.

The universe will readjust.

History will alter.

We believe that there is no absolute truth

excepting the truth

that there is no absolute truth. [quoted page 104]

and the statement of a graduate student :

They tell us that it is heresy to suggest the superiority of some value, fantasy to believe in moral argument, slavery to submit to a judgemtn sounder than your own. The freedom of our day is the freedom to devote ourselves to any value we please, on the mere condition that we do not believe them to be true. [page 107]

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Paul Torday’s debut novel makes me intensely jealous. There is no way I could ever get a first novel off the ground with such wit and humour, such intelligence and satire. But then I’m not Torday, and I’m not writing a first novel about a most odd subject.
I just finished this book today. It’s had some mixed reviews around the globe, but I found it perfectly charming. It doesn’t go far in any direction: the aspects of faith aren’t pushed so far that they become unbelievable (although obviously some grumpy secularist reviewers thought they were); the romance aspect is quietly handled, and there’s no shattering of marriages or sudden changes of direction for the characters; the use of various official papers and private notes and letters is hardly a new approach, but Torday handles it pretty well (except when he decided to put some sections out of sequence, something that didn’t strike me as necessary); the characters are more sharply drawn than some reviewers believed (probably the same secularists again); and though we don’t have dramatic scenes in the sense of characters playing off against each other (well, pretty rarely) because everything is told somewhat at one remove, we do have a competent approach to the action that does happen.
And then there’s all the stuff about salmon fishing. I don’t know that this book will convert a whole pile of readers into salmon fishers, but it won’t put them off either. The fishing side of things is interesting, and there’s just enough of it at any time. This avoids making the reader think: this isn’t a novel, it’s a fishing manual.
I found this book in a Valencia bookshop: I was desperate for something to read because my wife was taking so long to finish the fifth Ian Rankin, and Torday’s book was the only thing that looked worth a try. It was worth a try, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, reading it in two days - unfortunately. And my wife still hasn’t finished with Inspector Rebus.

Here are some short extracts from the book:
In the first, the main character, Fred has had a bit of an argument with his so-superior wife, who always expects everything to be on her terms.
“The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night. A relatively rare event in our marriage of late.
Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit.’” (Page 30)

Later Fred is having a meal with the Sheikh whose idea it is to enable his people to fish for salmon in the Yemen, and he tells Fred:
“’I regret to see your sadness, Dr Alfred. I would rather see you with an untroubled spirit and with your whole heart and mind bent upon our project. You need to learn to have faith, Dr Alfred. We believe that faith is the cure that heals all troubles. Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love.”’ (Page 139)

Much later, Fred reflects on this:
“I thought about the sheikh saying, although I could not remember his exact words, ‘Without faith, there is no hope. Without faith, there is no love.’
Then in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather than another. He knew me for what I was, an old, cold, cautious scientist. That was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood.
I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step away from a world which only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or buy. The people here [in the Yemen] still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry denial of other people’s belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation. That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs, not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the pervading sense of belief. “ (Page 281)