The Existence of Truth

Nothing in the Bible makes sense, if by "making sense"--which we usually want to do for ourselves and for other people--we have in mind the justification of any system of thought in terms of its original premises.  There are no original premises that can "make sense" to us.  This is not a predicament confined to religious worldviews--no explanation of existence that we entertain is based on anything more substantial than "Well, this is how things are, and on that basis we surmise what came before and what is to follow."

To be sure, the "examined life" is exhausting (if I may offer as a philosophical good the idea that wholesome and responsible life requires continual--as though that were possible--reflection on the bases that we claim for our stances and actions.)  Of course we will fail--in greater or lesser part--to ground ourselves always in what we claim as our premises.  Add to this the not-unreasonable contention that we are responsible continually to scrutinize those premises themselves, and we have what I hope is a fair notion of the difficulties we face in addressing existence.

Yet--if we cannot experience correlation between our expectations and our experiences--if existence does not touch back when we reach out to touch it (spatially or temporally)--then we cannot exist.  We exist across time, and we would think ourselves mad (or be driven mad) if we did not reckon on the existence of time.  Yet--any of us who claimed to "understand" time would be equally mad.  The same considerations must apply to space, to physicality.

Something must be "true" to us, or nothing is true.  I neither claim to apprehend what that nucleus (or all-encompassing milieu, or whatever--metaphor must fail) of truth is, nor do I pretend that I am clawing out to extract some "sense" from existence for anything other than self-interest.  If nothing persists in some essence from moment to moment or micron to micron, then I do not exist--at least as I conceptualize existence.  (Which "conceptualizer" might be "me," or it might not.  How should I know?)

From all this I intend to postulate that our experience--our life as we understand it--is the experience of truth.  "Truth," as we like to imagine it, is mostly a creation of our limited and usually self-serving interests.  We like to find truth (or imagine we could find truth) in, for example, what we read.  Or we like to think we could detect untruths, and pronounce this or that to be an untruth, and perhaps on occasion pen a telling response to an untruth.

Yet we detect untruths not as they exist in an atmosphere (or an arena) of innumerable, continually-challenged contentions--be they true or false.  No, we experience the abiding truth of existence and are able (or think we are able, or hope we are able) to detect anomalies.  Our existence occurs in truth.  To say that the situation is essentially reversed--that truth exists as an element of our existence or (what amounts to the same thing) that "true" can be understood as an adjective deployable at our command--is to lie to ourselves.

Yes--we can call things "true."  However, we cannot change the experiential state that we are assigned.  We are--by whatever cause, we cannot as rational beings ascertain--relegated to existence in what surrounds us: an experience-realm permeated by truth.  In my own portion of that (presumably-shared) experience-realm, my understanding of existence returns repeatedly and persistently to the Bible--or perhaps I should say, to what I have gleaned from the Bible.  Other people might say I have in error rejected most of it, and other people might say I should reject it all, but here I am most interested in how I share the experience-realm with them all, and how--as I contend--we all live and move in a default state of truth and truthfulness.

Or, to put it another way, "nonsense" is not the opposite of "sense."  "Nonsense" is what we call anything that has seemed to slip off the default matrix of "sense."

I have been leading to what I desire most to discuss now: The Original Creation.  (That's just me trying to come up with a term to describe something I do not understand.)

God, as described in Genesis 1, did not create an experience-realm of solid premises.  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (1:1, KJV) is an encapsulation of the story, not the story itself.  The earth is described at the start, and "the heaven" is created later.  Even from its first words, Genesis describes a beginning-state, not a beginning.

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (1:2a).  Nothing here is described other than as such description is negative--that is, "negative" not pejoratively, but conceptually.  The original creation was such as would defy those modes by which we form conceptualizations.

"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (1:2b).  It is hard to know what ought to be most striking about humanity's less-than-rapt reception of this saying.  The saying can be translated several ways, yet it would be intellectually indefensible to contend that the divine's presence was not indicated, and that the reference to "the Spirit of God" ought not to evoke the similarly-phrased "Holy Spirit" references in the Bible.

Yet what does Jesus cite as the most pertinent aspect of The Comforter?  "The Spirit of truth" (John 15:26).  Remembering that the upper vault of water was yet to be raised when Genesis says,

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

we are left with a chaotic, though succinctly described, vista.  Everything is chaos--indeed, this chaos might be understood to defy any phantasm we might conjure.  And surmounting the chaos is the Spirit of truth.

Then God calls forth light--which will be the metaphor and the reality of the test of Creation's fidelity to the divine plan--and calls it (and subsequently Creation) "good."  My assertion, then, if I have described it adequately, is that our existence--indeed all existence as we understand it--is mediated through truth.

To utter untruth, to act in untruth, is to defy the divine.  There is no mandate that we understand our existence, or that we torture ourselves and each other over the idea that we have to understand God.  One cannot avoid being reminded of Jesus (full well aware of the wind/spirit identification of the ancients) choosing the unfathomable origin of the wind--the earthly, mundane wind--as a parallel of being born "again" or "from above" in his conversation with Nicodemus in John 3.

We do not understand the wind--not in finality, not even today, or forever (as we conceptualize intellectual progress.)  Neither do we understand being born "from above," yet it is only a simplistic and self-serving type of theology that would ever require such a distorted and unsupportable view of the divine as to imagine we can understand being born "from above."

We are born again when we are blown away by the truth that impinges upon us with every experience.  Reminded of such things, we are reminded that all things are miraculous, and that the existence of truth itself is miraculous.