In 1887, college professor Henry Drummond said regarding
absolute truth, “Truth is not to be found in what I have been taught. That is
not truth. …Therefore, let us dismiss from our minds that predisposition to
regard that which we have been brought up in as being necessarily the truth.
…If that were the definition of truth, truth would be just what one’s parents
were—it would be a thing of hereditary transmission, and not a thing absolute
in itself.”
Truth is a thing in itself. We do not construct it or reconstruct
it.
In 1992, the Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy said in a ruling,
“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence,
of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
This concept of liberty is the opposite of absolutism, and it's
the very thing that is turning societies into aimless masses of less-liberated
individuals; seized and contained by our individual purposelessness, rather
than strong individuals amalgamated together with a clear purpose and direction
as a whole. If we truly believe we can redefine our reality based on what we
want our reality to be, our reality loses all meaning. If truth is everything,
it is nothing. Our reality becomes less and less real, the more we attempt to
assign our own conception of reality, rather than seek and accept the truth
that already is.
“Truth is no longer seen as objective and is no longer limited
to its rational dimension. Now, truth is viewed as subjective and one is free
to tap into emotions and intuition to find it. …Today, propositional truth has
taken a backseat to personal truth. Propositional truth asserts that our truth
claims can be stated and analyzed into logic, otherwise they are false. …The
answer to conflicting truth claims is not to rebuff the idea of absolutes, but
to instead find out what those absolutes are.” Todd Ahrend
Truth is not reducible to what my concept of existence is, thank
goodness. Truth cannot be adjusted to what I mean it to be, thank goodness. The
thing about truth is that if we try to conform it to our will, we don’t
actually change it. Truth, by definition, remains absolute even when we attempt
to call it anything but. Because truth is absolute, and we can’t actually
conform it to our will, things begin to fall apart when we try to squeeze it
into the space we want it to fit, or try to redefine it. We do not change truth
or fit truth into that small space of our perception and concepts of existence;
we squeeze ourselves into smaller and smaller spaces; we lose our intellectual
grip on reality; we become meaningless the more we intend to create our own
meaning.
“The result of an understanding of truth void of absolutes is
that it leaves no comprehensive categories of experience or knowledge. Because
it rejects the idea of a singular grand story—a metanarrative—that explains
what is true and gives meaning to all life, there is no overarching purpose
wherein one’s own experience can fit and find meaning. Instead, one’s own
experience is the only absolute. …One of the tragedies of the 21st century is
that this very popular belief system leaves little to live for. Ravi Zacharias
states: ‘There is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently,
there is no metanarrative to life, no overarching story by which all the
particulars can be interpreted… Life needs a story to understand the details.
Life needs to hold tighter at the center if we are to reach to distant
horizons. But our culture neither owns a story nor holds at the center.’” Todd
Ahrend
