Truth vs Reality
Why this is Important
Questions considering the nature of truth and reality may be more important today than ever before. When National Lampoon published their first volume of True Facts in 1981, it was a joke. It’s funny because it’s like, redundant. At least it was back then. Forty years later whole groups of people dismiss or deny facts because they don’t fit with their truth. If a demagogic leader doesn’t like an inconvenient fact, all s/he has to do is label it ‘fake news’. And they can get away with it because most people have neither the time nor the inclination to consider whether anything is real or true. Or more importantly, that real and true are completely different things.
What is Real? What is True?
I’m getting ready to retire next year, so I find myself looking back on my life and asking: What does it all mean? What is the point? Have I made a difference? Do I matter? Has it all been worth it? Where do I go from here? All my life I’ve been trying to get underneath the facade of things and get to the heart of the matter. That’s true about everything, and probably why I have college degrees in Humanities, Science, and Business. I’m naturally curious about all aspects of existence. Over the years I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations about any and all topics political, economic, ethical, sexual, philosophical, religious, etc. If I haven’t considered it yet, I’m always happy to explore something new. The purpose of each interaction seems to come down to two questions. What is real? And what is true? Those two questions have defined my personal journey toward enlightenment. That sounds really pompous when I read it out loud. And I don’t consider myself ‘enlightened’ by any stretch. But enlightenment is always my goal. I’m no more a philosopher than I am a golfer. I know how to play the game and I have been known to chase balls around a golf course. If I have a good stroke once in a while and don’t lose too many balls, I call it a good round. I suppose as a philosopher I could be considered a duffer.
Truth is Relative
My introduction to the difference between truth and reality came by way of a self-help group. When I was a young man, I had a problem with drugs. Like most drug addicts, I destroyed my life with one bad choice after another so I could feel the euphoria of oblivion one more time. In the end, I was utterly alone and destitute when I found Narcotics Anonymous. It was in the rooms of that twelve-step fellowship that I had a spiritual awakening and became a member of a recovering community. Like all communities NA has its stories and myths along with the Twelve Steps, Twelve Traditions and Twelve Concepts. Narcotics Anonymous has a unique understanding of God, and that is ‘none at all.’ NA has no opinion on God other than God exists. It is up to each member to seek out their own understanding of God and to respect every other member’s understanding as well. It’s even written down that way in Steps Three and Eleven. Recovery from drug addiction is a miracle that is expressed in my life every day. It is a grace I receive that I do not understand. Each member understands the gift of recovery in their own way. They feel the love of a higher power of their own understanding. We speak our own truths while we honor and embrace each other’s truths, because the evidence of those truths is real. We are each recovering from addiction in our own way with a unique relationship to a higher power. And that is part of what binds us together in a community. We can’t afford to be self-righteous. We all came from the gutter and we’re all one use away from heading right back there. NA taught me that believing my truth and honoring everyone else’s truth is invaluable, that our diversity is our strength.
Reality is Objective
Reality deals with the objective nature of the physical universe. Truth deals with one’s subjective understanding of the metaphysical universe. If something is real, its existence is a provable fact. My belief or lack of belief in that fact has no impact on its realness. If I jump off a building because I don’t believe in gravity, I’m still going to fall. Truth relates to propositions, not to facts. God created heaven and earth is a proposition. You can believe that statement is true or false, but it is not provably real. Truth and reality are never at odds because they are attributes of different realms. Most religions believe that God created the universe. Science tries to understand the reality of how that creation occurred. These concepts don’t conflict. Science has no quarrel with religion. My hope is that one day, religions will no longer have a quarrel with science or feel threatened by it. On October 31, 1991, Pope John Paul II apologized to Galileo.[1] John Paul said the theologians who condemned Galileo did not recognize the formal distinction between the Bible and its interpretation. “This led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.” That’s a good start.
Truth is a Mystery
Two people can believe totally different religions and even though they are completely contradictory, both can be true. A religion, a philosophy, or any construct of thought is like looking at the world through tinted glasses. Two people can look at God, one with purple-colored glasses and one with green. They both describe God, but in different terms and with different attributes. How can one be right and the other be wrong? They are describing the same thing, but each description has more to do with the glasses they are wearing than what they are looking at. The interesting thing is that the nature of God is not affected by our individual descriptions. God is incomprehensible. Since God is unknowable, personally I choose not to look through any glasses. I don’t even try to describe God. Actually, I don’t look at all and instead embrace agnosticism. To me, the question of whether or not God exists is not interesting. The nature of God’s existence or lack thereof has no effect on how I live my life. So, I have no opinion. I’m agnostic on the matter. And that is just as true as any religion.
Facts Can’t be Fake
Reality, on the other hand, is objective. It is what it is. Reality is well, real. It is based on facts. Facts are inarguably objective. They are the scientific underpinnings of the nature of the physical universe. You can’t have alternative facts or fake facts. We already have a name for those, they’re called lies. For instance, it is a provable fact that the earth is spherical[2]. We’ve known this for about 2,400 years. If a person espouses that the earth is flat, they are either ignorant of the facts, or they are lying with some nefarious motivation. Sadly in 2018, only two-thirds of millennials polled in the United States are convinced that the earth is round.[3]
That poll shocks me. Is our education so pathetic that only one-third of the people in our country between 25 and 40 years old have a basic understanding of the nature of our world? Haven’t they even watched Star Trek? The Enterprise entered orbit around hundreds of planets. These will soon be the leaders of our country. A few of them will be presidents someday. Don’t they have any critical thinking skills at all?
It’s All About the Questions
Why do people believe such nonsense? Partly because they don’t understand the scientific method. This is the process that scientists have used for 400 years to understand the physical universe in every scientific discipline.
Interestingly, the scientific method is circular. It starts and ends with a question. That’s how we continually get better at understanding things. We ask questions, propose a theory, and test that theory to see if it holds up to rigorous scrutiny. Then we ask more questions. We get closer and closer to understanding the sciences, but resolving one question typically leads to more questions. Those who don’t understand this method see scientists questioning all the time. Experts seldom say anything concretely or definitively. To normal everyday people, scientists seem wishy washy and full of doubt. So, the conclusion of a lot of people, however false, is that scientists don’t know anything and can’t be trusted. On top of that, there are unscrupulous people in various scientific fields who have actually manipulated their data to support a preconceived notion, supporting the distrust of the masses toward science. These people are few and far between, definitely the exception, not the rule. But ethical scientists are not newsworthy, so people forget that more than 99.9% of experts actually know what they are talking about.
The problem is that nature is complex and mysterious. Every time that we learn something about it, we realize that there is so much more that we don’t understand. Not only that, sometimes what we thought we knew turns out to be not true at all. New discoveries make us question conventional knowledge, or new and better instruments provide more refined measurements that allow us to look deeper or see farther than ever before. The result, is even more questions for scientists, and more distrust from common folk.
The Truth is in the Cookies
All religions are based on propositions. Each has its own stories and myths that form the basis for understanding the spiritual, metaphysical realm.
- Judaism holds that there is one God, incorporeal and eternal, who wants all people to do what is just and merciful.[5]
- Christians believe God sent his son Jesus, the Messiah, to save the world. They believe Jesus was crucified to offer the forgiveness of sins and was resurrected three days after his death before ascending to heaven.[6]
- Muslims hold that mankind should behave morally and treat each other in the best possible manner to please God.[7]
- Hindus believe in many gods, which are seen as manifestations of a single unity. They believe in the universal law of cause and effect (karma) and reincarnation.[8]
- Buddhists believe that suffering exists; it has a cause; it has an end; and it has a cause to bring about its end.[9]
- Pagans believe that nature is sacred and that the natural cycles of birth, growth and death observed in the world around us carry profoundly spiritual meanings.[10]
- Astrology is the belief that the alignment of stars and planets affects every individual’s mood, personality, and environment, depending on when s/he was born.[11]
The truth of each of these propositions are based on context. Each one is making a supposition that cannot be proven, but must be taken on faith. When I was a freshman in college, homesickness was epidemic and the only treatment was care packages. It seemed like once a week or so, one of the guys in the dorm would receive a care package from home and almost instantly everyone knew that the package had arrived. “Dude, let’s go to Joe’s room. He just got a care package and his mother makes the best cookies.” It didn’t matter whether it was Joe, Kyle, or Chuck. When a package arrived, his mom made the best cookies. It was kind of a joke, but that didn’t make it any less true. If you’re a homesick college freshman, you’ll grab onto any bit of tender loving care that you can. You’ll experience the love of your own mother vicariously through someone else’s cookies. Just because they were there, they were the best. It’s all about the context.
Truth and Reality are Interrelated
Throughout history humankind has tried to understand that first question I asked, “What does it all mean?” Before recorded history we invented systems of religion to bring meaning to seemingly random “acts of god”. We tried to calm each other’s fears in the thunder storm so we could feel safe. We created systems of reward and punishment based on a mythical authority so that we could create societies and work together effectively. We devised rituals that brought meaning to our lives. We have written stories and myths to explain the unknowable to each other. Different people in different places at different times created their own religions to bring together a community. And that is a good thing, a true thing. We are social animals, pack animals after a fashion. That’s probably why dogs integrate into our families so easily. They instinctively understand the nature of the pack and our families become their pack. But for packs to work together as a society requires a shared belief system. Without religions, and the communities they create, humans would still be hunter/gathers in small tribes.[12] So, in a sense, without religion we would not have technology. Without an unprovable shared truth, we could not work together to prove the nature of reality. Reality needs truth and vice versa.
Conflating Truth and Reality is Dangerous
It’s important to believe that your understanding of God is true. It’s just as important to understand that no religion is real. Each system of spiritual tenets contains the truth, but none has a corner on the market in truth. Thinking that mine is the “one true religion” is either arrogant or delusional. When the proponents of a religion believe that it represents reality, that religion transforms into a cult. When that happens, horrific things follow like the Westboro Baptist Church protests, the Waco Massacre, the Jonestown mass murder-suicide, 9/11, the Holocaust, and that’s just recently. Human history is littered with fascism, holy wars and atrocities committed by true believers. Why? Because our beliefs define us. They help us understand our place in society. People want to believe they are right and it’s easy to fall into the trap that if I’m right, then everyone else is wrong. That’s why religious conservativism is so popular, they tell us what to love and who to hate. People ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ because they want to.
One Reality, Many Truths
Living in a free society is hard. Understanding that someone else’s truth doesn’t threaten my own is difficult. The effort required to separate facts from rhetoric can seem overwhelming, but it’s worth it. In the words of Andrew Shepard, my favorite fictional American President, “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight.”[13] In 1978, I was horrified that the Supreme Court allowed Nazi’s to march in Skokie, Illinois. But that has become a landmark decision[14] creating the benchmark for tolerance and the importance of free speech. Even more stunning than the decision was the fact that Mr. Goldberger, the ACLU lawyer who defended the neo-Nazi’s right to march, was Jewish. He received a lot of criticism, but he was a man of heartfelt integrity who understood the monumental importance of the difference between subjective truth and objective reality.
When it comes to truth and reality, one is not better than the other. Not only are they both necessary, they depend on each other. One of my favorite sayings in Narcotics Anonymous is “One promise, many gifts”. The one promise is freedom from active addiction. That’s it, plain and simple. NA helped me recover from addiction. Building a life worth living is up to me. That’s where the many gifts come from. I have to live life on life’s terms, that’s the reality. How I navigate my life is based on my personal truth.
Our Diversity is Our Strength
We each have our own beliefs. Some are based on a formal ethical system passed down from one generation to another through a religion or culture. Some are invented as we wander through our individual journeys. It doesn’t matter how we name God. It doesn’t matter whether we believe in the healing power of crystals. Or even if we base our personal truth on the power of “The Force” that we saw in a movie. We each have a unique perspective from our life experience that informs our personal truths. That is a beautiful thing. Our individual truths actually bind us together if we let them. If we can honor each other’s truths as much as we cherish our own, and remember that our truth is different from reality, then maybe we’ll be able to embrace the fact that we all have something to learn from each other. And when we learn from each other, we start to trust each other. Once that happens, who knows what’s possible.
[1] http://www.baskent.edu.tr/~tkaracay/etudio/agora/news/Galileo.html
[2] Popular Science, 1/26/2016, by Moriel Schottlender
[3] Forbes Magazine, 4/4/2018, by Trevor Nace
[4] By Efbrazil — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102392470
[5] Embassy Of Israel In The Netherlands, https://embassies.gov.il/hague-en/aboutisrael/people/Pages/Jewish-Religion.aspx
[6] History.com, https://www.history.com/topics/religion/history-of-christianity
[7] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_in_Islam
[8] Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/south-east-se-asia/india-art/a/beliefs-of-hinduism
[9] Public Broadcasting Service, https://www.pbs.org/edens/thailand/buddhism.htm
[10] National Health Service, http://www.waht.nhs.uk/en-GB/NHS-Mobile/Our-Services/?depth=4&srcid=2007
[11] West Texas A&M University, https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/03/23/how-does-astrology-work/
[12] Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, ©2015
[13] Sorkin, Allen ©2001, American Rhetoric. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtheamericanpresident.html
[14] National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie
