Easter 2017 - Pilate's Question Revisited
Easter 2017 - Pilate's Question Revisited
Their moment had come. The crowd was seething, fired up, shouting,
waving placards, emotional. They were the disenfranchised, those left
behind. They had lost their country to the global forces that had washed
over them. Yet here, in numbers, they seemed to have power to force the
Establishment to take this decision, this one decision, on their terms. It
was a heady moment. They demanded the death penalty.
At the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of
the Province of Judaea at the time, famously asked the question, "What is
truth?" A post-truth moment 2000 years ago?
"What is truth?" It is a question that generations of philosophy students
have learned to ask from early in their careers - and to toy endlessly with
- as they mull over propositional logic, correspondence theories of truth,
coherence theories of truth and infinite variations on the like. There have,
no doubt, always been those "that delight in giddiness; and count it a
bondage to fix a belief" (Francis Bacon, Of Truth, 1625). Recent
generations have had old-fashioned Scepticism underpinned by so-called
post-modern theory which denies that there is any such thing as objective
reality or absolute truth. Here "truth" is a relative word used in social,
historical and political discourse. It is contextual and constructed. For
Michel Foucault it was a weapon of power, of cultural hegemony, of
violence and exclusion. "Language," he said, "is oppression."
"What is truth?" John 18:38 has Pilate use the common Greek word for
"truth" - "aletheia". For ordinary, non-philosophical Greeks in the ancient
world, at least from the time of Homer, "aletheia" meant "truth", just as
modern common-sense English-language dialogue, or a courtroom or a
television quiz show, would use the word "truth". It was - and is - the
opposite of telling a lie. Grammatically, "aletheia" was the negative of
"lethe", meaning "oblivion" or "concealment". "Aletheia" meant not only
"truth", but also "disclosure". "Aletheia" thus bore a strong resemblance
to reality and this carried over into the more refined realm of the
philosophers - "To say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not,
is true." (Aristotle, Metaphysics). For Socrates, the pursuit of truth was
worth more than life itself. Plato's ontology may have loosed these
common-sense moorings of "truth", by attempting to locate truth in his
timeless realm of forms and ideas; but, by and large, it was the
Aristotelian view that prevailed, not only in modern propositional logic,
but also in ordinary dialogue.
Come the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger resurrected the old Greek
term "aletheia" as a quasi-technical term in modern philosophy and
suggested that it might be something more than just our common-sense
"truth". Aletheia, for Heidegger, was more about how we make sense of
the universe as part of a holistic background of meaning, and there is, of
course, some merit in this. But put on a pair of Nietzschean boots
("Suppose we want truth. Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even
ignorance? ... Why insist on the truth?" - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, 1886), and from there it is only a few steps for this
conceptual approach to find its way into post-modern ideas about "truth"
itself - a relative, constructed and contextual way of speaking that
reinforces all those nasty Establishment things that Foucault talked about.
It was certainly easier for the idea of post-modern truth to take root in a
climate where naturalism was becoming the default world view. Alvin
Plantinga advanced what has come to be known as the "Evolutionary
Argument against Naturalism". Basically, the argument runs that if
evolution and naturalism are both true, human brains have evolved to
produce beliefs that have survival value. Such beliefs may be true, but it
cannot be certain that they are true. With our brains thus adapted for
survival, we have a fundamental basis for questioning the truth value of
what the brain thinks - including, for Plantinga, the ideas of evolution and
naturalism themselves. If, however, naturalism and evolution are
assumed, taken as granted, then truth itself becomes the inevitable
casualty.
Of course, we must acknowledge some of the valuable insights of the
post-modernist critique. But its "delight in giddiness" cannot be the end
of the story. Daniel Dennett has written perceptively on the problems of
the post-modern idea of truth. In a 2013 article on www.edge.org
subtitled Let's start with a respect for truth, he wrote, "Post modernism,
the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only
interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left
behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by the very
idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations'
in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted
with whatever style can be mustered." It is something Dennett has been
saying for a long time. In The Emerging Third Culture (1991), he wrote
"...traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly
reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of
the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their
culture, which dismisses science, is often non-empirical. It uses its own
jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterised by
comments on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually
reaching the point where the real world gets lost."
It is said that it takes twenty-five to fifty years for intellectual currents
circulating in the deep seas of academia to wash through to the rocky
shores of the real world; and, lo and behold, in 2016, the Oxford English
Dictionary chose "post-truth" as its word of the year. In that year that upended
the post-war liberal consensus, Michael Gove, as part of the Brexit
campaign in Britain, dismissed the relevance of experts. Donald Trump
dismissed CIA claims of Russian interference in the US Presidential
election without, apparently, even considering the evidence. The
examples where facts and truth were seen as irrelevant, if not
unknowable, multiplied through the airwaves of political discourse. It
was Foucault's analysis of truth as part of the Establishment's support
structure, but it was also more than that. It was the manipulation of the
impossibility of truth to create another basis for power, another reality,
facilitated by the advent of social media filters and a world where "like"
substitutes for "true" and where unpalatable facts are kept outside the
firewall and policed by trigger warnings and safe spaces. Oxford
Dictionaries' President, Caspar Grathwohl, commented, "I wouldn't be
surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our times...
Fuelled by the rise of social media and a growing distrust of facts offered
up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its
footing for some time."
"What is truth?" When that proto-post-modernist Pontius Pilate used the
word "truth" - "aletheia" - just before the first Easter some 2000 years
ago, he was responding to Jesus' use of the same word. "You are right,"
Jesus said, "in saying that I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born,
and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the
side of truth listens to me." (John 18:37 - NIV). Earlier in John's Gospel,
Jesus had previously used the same word - "aletheia" - in response to a
question from Thomas, later "doubting Thomas", the apostle who
demanded empirical evidence: "I am the way - and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me,
you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and
have seen him." (John 14:6, 7 - NIV.) Here, aletheia clearly also takes on
some its meaning as the disclosure of reality. CS Lewis: "I believe in
Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else." (CS Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?,
1962)
This Easter Christians around the world will, quite rightly, be meditating
on the way and the life - the Way of the Cross on Good Friday, and the
Life in Christ's Resurrection on Easter Sunday. On the Saturday in
between, Holy Saturday, it might be worthwhile also spending a few
moments reflecting on the third element of Jesus' words in John Chapter
14: "I am the truth."
Gordon McKechnie
Their moment had come. The crowd was seething, fired up, shouting,
waving placards, emotional. They were the disenfranchised, those left
behind. They had lost their country to the global forces that had washed
over them. Yet here, in numbers, they seemed to have power to force the
Establishment to take this decision, this one decision, on their terms. It
was a heady moment. They demanded the death penalty.
At the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of
the Province of Judaea at the time, famously asked the question, "What is
truth?" A post-truth moment 2000 years ago?
"What is truth?" It is a question that generations of philosophy students
have learned to ask from early in their careers - and to toy endlessly with
- as they mull over propositional logic, correspondence theories of truth,
coherence theories of truth and infinite variations on the like. There have,
no doubt, always been those "that delight in giddiness; and count it a
bondage to fix a belief" (Francis Bacon, Of Truth, 1625). Recent
generations have had old-fashioned Scepticism underpinned by so-called
post-modern theory which denies that there is any such thing as objective
reality or absolute truth. Here "truth" is a relative word used in social,
historical and political discourse. It is contextual and constructed. For
Michel Foucault it was a weapon of power, of cultural hegemony, of
violence and exclusion. "Language," he said, "is oppression."
"What is truth?" John 18:38 has Pilate use the common Greek word for
"truth" - "aletheia". For ordinary, non-philosophical Greeks in the ancient
world, at least from the time of Homer, "aletheia" meant "truth", just as
modern common-sense English-language dialogue, or a courtroom or a
television quiz show, would use the word "truth". It was - and is - the
opposite of telling a lie. Grammatically, "aletheia" was the negative of
"lethe", meaning "oblivion" or "concealment". "Aletheia" meant not only
"truth", but also "disclosure". "Aletheia" thus bore a strong resemblance
to reality and this carried over into the more refined realm of the
philosophers - "To say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not,
is true." (Aristotle, Metaphysics). For Socrates, the pursuit of truth was
worth more than life itself. Plato's ontology may have loosed these
common-sense moorings of "truth", by attempting to locate truth in his
timeless realm of forms and ideas; but, by and large, it was the
Aristotelian view that prevailed, not only in modern propositional logic,
but also in ordinary dialogue.
Come the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger resurrected the old Greek
term "aletheia" as a quasi-technical term in modern philosophy and
suggested that it might be something more than just our common-sense
"truth". Aletheia, for Heidegger, was more about how we make sense of
the universe as part of a holistic background of meaning, and there is, of
course, some merit in this. But put on a pair of Nietzschean boots
("Suppose we want truth. Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even
ignorance? ... Why insist on the truth?" - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, 1886), and from there it is only a few steps for this
conceptual approach to find its way into post-modern ideas about "truth"
itself - a relative, constructed and contextual way of speaking that
reinforces all those nasty Establishment things that Foucault talked about.
It was certainly easier for the idea of post-modern truth to take root in a
climate where naturalism was becoming the default world view. Alvin
Plantinga advanced what has come to be known as the "Evolutionary
Argument against Naturalism". Basically, the argument runs that if
evolution and naturalism are both true, human brains have evolved to
produce beliefs that have survival value. Such beliefs may be true, but it
cannot be certain that they are true. With our brains thus adapted for
survival, we have a fundamental basis for questioning the truth value of
what the brain thinks - including, for Plantinga, the ideas of evolution and
naturalism themselves. If, however, naturalism and evolution are
assumed, taken as granted, then truth itself becomes the inevitable
casualty.
Of course, we must acknowledge some of the valuable insights of the
post-modernist critique. But its "delight in giddiness" cannot be the end
of the story. Daniel Dennett has written perceptively on the problems of
the post-modern idea of truth. In a 2013 article on www.edge.org
subtitled Let's start with a respect for truth, he wrote, "Post modernism,
the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only
interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left
behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by the very
idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations'
in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted
with whatever style can be mustered." It is something Dennett has been
saying for a long time. In The Emerging Third Culture (1991), he wrote
"...traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly
reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of
the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their
culture, which dismisses science, is often non-empirical. It uses its own
jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterised by
comments on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually
reaching the point where the real world gets lost."
It is said that it takes twenty-five to fifty years for intellectual currents
circulating in the deep seas of academia to wash through to the rocky
shores of the real world; and, lo and behold, in 2016, the Oxford English
Dictionary chose "post-truth" as its word of the year. In that year that upended
the post-war liberal consensus, Michael Gove, as part of the Brexit
campaign in Britain, dismissed the relevance of experts. Donald Trump
dismissed CIA claims of Russian interference in the US Presidential
election without, apparently, even considering the evidence. The
examples where facts and truth were seen as irrelevant, if not
unknowable, multiplied through the airwaves of political discourse. It
was Foucault's analysis of truth as part of the Establishment's support
structure, but it was also more than that. It was the manipulation of the
impossibility of truth to create another basis for power, another reality,
facilitated by the advent of social media filters and a world where "like"
substitutes for "true" and where unpalatable facts are kept outside the
firewall and policed by trigger warnings and safe spaces. Oxford
Dictionaries' President, Caspar Grathwohl, commented, "I wouldn't be
surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our times...
Fuelled by the rise of social media and a growing distrust of facts offered
up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its
footing for some time."
"What is truth?" When that proto-post-modernist Pontius Pilate used the
word "truth" - "aletheia" - just before the first Easter some 2000 years
ago, he was responding to Jesus' use of the same word. "You are right,"
Jesus said, "in saying that I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born,
and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the
side of truth listens to me." (John 18:37 - NIV). Earlier in John's Gospel,
Jesus had previously used the same word - "aletheia" - in response to a
question from Thomas, later "doubting Thomas", the apostle who
demanded empirical evidence: "I am the way - and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me,
you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and
have seen him." (John 14:6, 7 - NIV.) Here, aletheia clearly also takes on
some its meaning as the disclosure of reality. CS Lewis: "I believe in
Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else." (CS Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?,
1962)
This Easter Christians around the world will, quite rightly, be meditating
on the way and the life - the Way of the Cross on Good Friday, and the
Life in Christ's Resurrection on Easter Sunday. On the Saturday in
between, Holy Saturday, it might be worthwhile also spending a few
moments reflecting on the third element of Jesus' words in John Chapter
14: "I am the truth."
Gordon McKechnie
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