What’s True? And How Can I Know?

Many times over the years I have had people wanting me to believe new things. If you have ever been accosted by an evangelist on a street corner, or spent any time at all scrolling through social media, you have probably experienced some version of this yourself. The evangelist does not have to be of the religious variety. It might be a political ideology, social cause, nutritional program, a new technology, an investment opportunity or almost anything else around which people gather ideas and enthusiasm. Sometimes the invitation is simply to consider an idea, product or service. Other times there is a stronger sense that a position is already available for me within the world of the person speaking: convert or denier, ally or adversary.

There was a time when this kind of encounter would cause me to think primarily about the person or group in front of me. Do I agree with them? What happens I accept what they are saying? What happens if I decline?

If I accept the invitation to be an ally (I accept the invitation to recite the prayer the person wants me to, to part with my pile of money for the product or service they are offering, or I agree with the political campaigner and agree to give them my vote) then I have been accepted by the person in the moment, then to be fairly quickly discarded while their attention moves on to the next potential proselyte. If I decline the invitation, will that be regarded as hostility? My silence regarded as violence, and my unwillingness to join the cause becomes evidence that I am somehow allied with whichever form of moral degeneracy the evangelist has been warning me about?

Somewhere along the way, though, another question began taking precedence for me: What’s true?

And moreover, how can I know?

In the religious community I was part of for many years, the refrain was oft repeated; ‘You’ve got to know that you know.’ I think the idea underneath this refrain was that certitude in the belief was itself evidence of its accuracy. The circular reasoning was exposed for the fallacy it was during a simple conversation on a Saturday afternoon. A friend and I were in Liverpool (more than twenty years ago now) and struck up a conversation with another gentleman about Jesus. This man said to us, ‘I know that I know that Joseph Smith has the truth.’ The conversation was enjoyable and amicable and we all left on good terms. I did not know much about the Mormon church at that time, but I knew enough to understand that the claims of Joseph Smith and mainstream Christianity were incompatible. My minister knew that he knew. This man knew that he knew. Certitude told me something about the men holding the beliefs; it did not help me at all in determining the validity the beliefs themselves. ‘Knowing that I know,’ just wasn’t going to cut it.

I had another useful experience in early 2022 when a lady invited me to participate in a weekly online Bible study. Initially it sounded very good and healthy. She presented the gospel as humanity being separated from God by sin, and that faith was how we could be reconciled with God. Yep, I agreed with that entirely, however, I pressed the question; Faith in what?

Her answer was faith in 'prophecy.'

My heart began to sink because I realised that Jesus was not going to be the centre of this lady’s faith. As it turned out, she believed that it was faith in the interpretation of the prophecies in Revelation, as understood by ‘Pastor’ Lee Man Hee. The familiar language had created an impression of agreement while the governing idea remained opaque.

That encounter has stayed useful to me because it sharpened a question I now ask quite regularly: What exactly is the idea I am being invited to accept?

The Bible is a Christocentric text. Christ is its central figure and the One through whom I make sense of its larger story. So when an interpretation, expression or application increasingly requires some other person to occupy the interpretive centre, I become curious about what has happened. Where did this idea enter the story? How is Scripture being read? How did the person arrive there? What does the idea actually claim? Those questions help me understand the position before I decide what I think about it.

This is where my own process begins.

I should probably put some of my cards on the table first. I carry certain suppositions into this enquiry. Two in particular have become foundational ideas for Think for Christ’s Sake:

Truth is true and knowable.

All truth claims are disputed.

I am aware that the first claim is itself disputed, which rather nicely demonstrates the second! I am also aware that there are enormous philosophical conversations behind that little word 'knowable,' and I have no intention here of pretending to settle several thousand years of epistemology before lunch. I am interested in the more personal question: given those suppositions, how do I go about deciding what I think is true?

Dallas Willard uses the image of an ideational sea: world events and individual lives ride upon ideas, whether those ideas have been consciously examined or have simply become part of the water in which we live. I have become increasingly interested in finding the idea underneath the behaviour, the movement, the teaching, the conflict or the invitation. What is being claimed? What ideas have to be present for that claim to make sense? What other ideas follow once it is accepted?

When I think about my own process, two lines of enquiry seem to emerge. One concerns the person or community through whom I am encountering the idea. The other concerns the idea itself. I separate them here because they lead me to different kinds of questions, though in ordinary life I tend to move backwards and forwards between them.

The person and the community

Ideas always arrive from somewhere. I encounter them through a person, a book, a church, a political movement, a university, a YouTube video, a podcast, a friendship group or some combination of these. So part of my curiosity concerns how the person in front of me understands the idea they are sharing. Where do they understand it to have come from? What led them to find it credible? What sources, experiences or people have contributed to the way they understand it now? What do the important words mean when they use them?

How thoroughly have they investigated that claim for themselves? How open is the person to new evidence? Alternate viewpoints? Can they fairly represent the alternate position without resorting to strawmen, false equivocations or non sequiturs? What are their beliefs about individuals or other communities who do not agree with their ideas?

What is their motivation for asking me to believe these ideas? Is it because they love me? Want to control me? Invite me into their community? Demonstrate that I am an enemy to their community?

What is their evaluation of me if I decline the invitation to adopt the idea on offer?

Perhaps more fundamentally, are they inviting me to play? I mean play quite seriously. Is there room to pick the idea up, turn it around, stretch it, test it, ask awkward questions, discover something unexpected, make a joke, realise that one of us has misunderstood something and then keep going? I thoroughly enjoy that kind of conversation. It is one of the great joys of thinking.

Is this a fun yet serious exploration of ideas, counter-ideas, distortions, corruptions, corrections? Or is the more sinister presence of fear, force and control underlying the request to adopt the idea? For example, I speak in tongues in my prayer life. Just writing that line will cause some people to adopt a different posture towards me. I met one lady who was physically assaulted by her pastor for speaking in tongues. I met another man who was told if he does not speak in tongues then he is going to hell! All parties claiming to be ‘Christian.’ Before I wrestle too much with any idea itself, I am curious as to the intent, purpose and motivation of the person who wants me to adopt one of their ideas as my own. If fear, force or threats are part of the process, the credibility of the idea (as well as the person purporting it) are diminished in my mind.

This is partly why I want to understand the person and the community before I rush too quickly to a conclusion about what has been said. It gives me some sense of the plausibility structure surrounding the belief. It also helps me notice the pressures operating on me while I am considering it.

Then I want to play with the idea itself.

The idea

Here the questions change. Where did the idea originate? When does it first appear, at least as far as I can discover? Who articulated it? And why? What problem were they attempting to understand? What other ideas were already on the table when this one emerged? Has the idea remained relatively stable since then, or has it changed as other people have used it?

Carl Jung provides a useful example. He was considering the stories and beliefs of cultures in a vast array of history and geography. He observed that the same metaphorical archetypes continued to appear. His explanation, in part, was to speculate that there is a collective unconscious of humanity that we are all part of. Jung observed recurring figures, symbols and patterns appearing in myths, religions, dreams and stories across cultures and across long periods of history. The Sovereign (king/queen), the Warrior, the Lover, the Magician (and their archetypal shadows, tyrant/weakling, sadist/masochist etc.) seemed to appear in places where simple direct borrowing did not always seem sufficient to explain the similarity. Jung developed the idea of the collective unconscious as part of his explanation: that beneath the personal unconscious there are structures shared by humanity which find expression through these recurring archetypal forms.

I find the observation fascinating while interpreting its cause differently. From my own theological framework, I posit that some of what Jung was observing could be approached through the Imago Dei. Humanity shares a Creator; perhaps recurring patterns tell us something about the image carried by the creature, along with the various distortions and shadows of that image. Jung and I might therefore look at some of the same phenomena and propose different explanations for why they exist.

That is interesting to me. Now I have something to explore. What did Jung actually observe? How strong were his observations? How well does his explanation account for them? What does the Imago Dei explain? Where does my interpretation struggle? Are there phenomena Jung accounts for more readily than I do? Does his account require assumptions I do not share? Does mine?

This is what I mean when I say that I like to pull an idea in different directions and see what happens.

I want to know how far it travels. I want to place apparently contradictory ideas beside it and see whether they genuinely contradict each other or are speaking about different parts of the problem. I want to know what happens when the idea moves out of abstraction and becomes practice. I want to look for situations where it appears to explain something very well and others where its explanatory power begins to weaken. Sometimes an idea breaks. Sometimes it bends. Sometimes I discover that I was pulling on a caricature and need to go back and understand the thing properly.

Other thinkers are enormously helpful in this process because they allow me to borrow minds very different from my own. If you are so inclined, I recommend listening to The Immanuel Kant Collection and then following it with The Friedrich Nietzsche Collection, both available on audible. The experience is almost comical because the movement of the two minds feels so different.

Reading Kant and then Nietzsche is like travelling first on the back of an elephant and then watching a falcon take to the air above you. And afterwards, you may find yourself experiencing both perspectives simultaneously; a peculiar sensation indeed! Kant proceeds by weight, structure and patient footing, testing the ground beneath every step. Nietzsche moves by altitude, speed and sudden changes of perspective, seeing connections from above that disappear at ground level. Neither creature is a better version of the other; they inhabit the same landscape differently. And the reader is in the peculiar position of being both rider and observer—carried through the terrain by Kant while watching Nietzsche fly overhead, wondering which view of the landscape is revealing what the other cannot see.

That is great fun.

It also helps me resist the temptation to assume that the first formulation of an idea I encounter is the only one available. Someone has always thought about it before. Quite often someone has spent forty years thinking about it before I wandered in on Tuesday afternoon with a clever observation.

Patterns are another part of my process. I tend to think in patterns anyway, and I have come to believe that sufficiently broad observation often reveals structures that are difficult to see in a single event. So when I notice something, I start wondering where else it appears. Has anyone studied it? Is there research? History? Philosophy? Theology? Has somebody written a book about it? Is there a lecture, an obscure paper, a two-hour YouTube conversation with twelve thousand views and a bloke in the comments section who has somehow supplied the missing reference?

The internet is a strange and marvelous place.

Pattern recognition also requires some care because human beings are extraordinarily good at finding patterns, including patterns that are not there. So the appearance of repetition begins an enquiry for me; it does not finish one. How large is the sample? Are the cases genuinely comparable? Am I selecting examples because they fit what I already believe? What happens when I deliberately look for the exceptions?

There is a lot of effort involved in all of this.

Frankly, I enjoy it.

For me, thinking in this way has increasingly become an act of worship. Paul writes of Christ as the One “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Christ invites me to come and learn from Him. He invites me to abide in His love. I find myself returning often to the thought that Christ loves me with His mind; He thinks of me. There is something majestic and worshipful in responding to Him with mine.

That also changes the emotional atmosphere of the enquiry. I do not have to know everything. I cannot know everything.

A year or two ago somebody asked me in a lunch room, “What do you know?” My immediate answer was, “What I don’t know will always and forever be infinitely more than what I do know.” It just kind of slipped out. But I think in my unthinking moment, I stumbled on a profound idea.

And I still think that is true.

There are two ways I have responded to that thought. At times I become overwhelmed by the immensity of knowledge that I will never master, other times I am delighted by the amount of reality still available to explore. As I have walked more with Christ, and seen that He is inviting me to love Him with all my mind, the intellectual terrain looks much more inviting. The created universe begins to look like an immense playground of ideas, creatures, histories, persons, systems, discovery, beauty, goodness, tragedy, language, mathematics, music, theology and things for which I do not yet have names.

So where does this leave my original questions? What's True? And How Can I Know?

I begin with two suppositions: truth is true and knowable; all truth claims are disputed. From there I try to understand the idea being offered to me, the person and community through whom I am encountering it, the assumptions that support it, its history, its explanatory power, its consequences and its limits. I try to notice my own desires while I am doing so. Then I pull on the thing and see where it goes.

I am deliberately using the word I throughout this article. This is my process. I am putting it on the table where you can inspect it. Borrow whatever helps, question whatever does not, and pay attention to the way you yourself decide that something is true. You may have ways of thinking that correct mine.

I rather hope you do.

There is hard work in thinking well, and there is heart work too. I find that the combination produces a peculiar mixture of satisfaction and appetite. A mountain climber can stand somewhere available in principle to almost anybody and experience something that required months or years of preparation to reach. The mountain was there the whole time. The view was there too. Preparation changes what the climber is capable of seeing.

Perhaps learning to think is something like that. And in the learning I accept the invitation to love Him with all my mind. Knowing that as I do, He is going to reveal even more to me of His rich knowledge and wisdom. Praise be to God for inviting me to think for Christ’s sake.