What is the Truth.

If you were to say to my wife, “congratulations I hear you are expecting.” And if she says yes and I say no, what would you do with that?

You might try to come up with a reason to what is happening here… “either he is lying or maybe he is delusional or maybe she is not pregnant” …etc.

Why do we go through that process?
It’s important to find reality.
My wife can’t be pregnant and not pregnant at the same time.

Two contradictory statements can’t be both true and false, at the same time, in the same sense. To deny this is only to affirm it. You can say that this statement is not true but if so you will be assuming that the denial is true and the statement is not. But that is precisely what the statement says-that two contradictory statements cannot both be true. There is no way to get around this. Folks, truth by definition is exclusive. Either my wife is pregnant or she is not pregnant. Not both in the same way and at the same time.

Therefore, when Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father except through me," He was making a very reasonable statement by affirming truth's exclusivity. The question one may legitimately ask is whether He demonstrated that claim rather than just stating it.(1)

You may have heard of a former police sergeant that was charged with inappropriate sexual contact with two 12-year-old boys. Of course, everyone involved swears in to tell the truth before they testify. But we all want to know who is telling the truth. Is it the accused or is it the alleged victims. It can’t be both that are telling the truth, either the police sergeant was telling the truth that he is innocent or the boys are telling the truth that he is guilty. But he can’t be both innocent and guilty of the crime at the same time in the same sense. By the way, the sergeant in this story was recently acquitted, that means he was found to be “Not Guilty”.

How important is the truth? Imagine you were the accused in this case, or the parents and family members of the boys, how important would the truth be to them?

It’s important to find reality. Some say that truth is relative (postmodernism).

[Postmodernism] affirms that whatever we accept as truth and even the way we envision truth are dependent on the community in which we participate . . . There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate. (2)

With this in mind, let me ask you a question, when is it justified to rape someone?
The answer should be obvious to you. If people don’t get reality right, reality has a way of bruising people who don’t take it seriously. I wrote a post in March about truth being exclusive called The opposite of False.

As I’ve said before, I’m not interested in a leap of faith against reason. I’m looking at trying to figure out what the truth of the matter is and then investing my intelligent faith in that so that I can live right. And this is the same type of Christianity, religious view, which Jesus offered. Truth is very meaningful to our lives.

(1) Ravi Zacharias, The Inextinguishable Light (1996).
(2) Grenz, S. J., A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8.

For further study see, Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl,
Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1998)