Musing 6

“What is truth?”

That question, cynically asked by Pilate, likely again has a ring of cynicism to it in our day, when even before the rise of LLM AI, we had perfected the art of propaganda, to where the most propagandized were often those who saw themselves as the ones freed from it.

It also doesn’t help that for most people, we do not contemplate what it means that God is the God of truth. This doesn’t just mean that lying is wrong, but that truth is something to be valued and rejoiced in, even if the hard truths of the day are difficult for us to rejoice in because of our finiteness.

And what tells us that truth is to be valued? The multiple Proverbs that tell us that false witness is equivalent to murder, or that rejoicing in the truth is central to Christian love.

And so, what are the things holding us back from rigorous thought?

The most common thing is that people simply don’t care. And it’s understandable. In our world where we are bombarded with information that has been precisely designed to hype us up and drive us to specific conclusions, it’s easy to just go with the flow. Or because we don’t have influence on something, we don’t put much thought into the accuracy or ramblings of the talking heads or news sources we pay attention to. And of course, even when we do care, sometimes we just don’t have the time to do careful analysis of everything we may want to, especially if technical knowledge is required.

And so how do we faithfully honor God in the midst of the age of daily information warfare?

I think first is that we take care to make sure that we haven’t idolized the talking heads, whether they be political, religious, or an expert in any other area. We should be as the Bereans were and test all things by the Scriptures. What that looks like in practice is recognizing that the talking heads are just like us, fallen humans. By doing that, we take away the functional infallibility that so often leads to the glassy eyed, shrill conversations we are too often aware of.

The other half of this is recognizing where we are allowing the world to define the categories by which we analyze issues. A saying I learned from Dr. James White (with similar sentiments echoed by many others) is that “He who frames the debate, wins the debate.” As we let Scripture define the categories of our thoughts, we will begin to recognize where the sin in our camp is. If we want to be a light on a hill, we first start by burning the dross in front of us.

As we sanctify our minds, we must begin to think through things more than 1 step at a time. We should learn to think things through to the conclusions, even if those conclusions would put us at odds with the idols that we have unknowingly allowed to be raised up. A good practical aid here is learning to play chess. If you want to get good at chess, it will teach you to think “ok, here’s what I’ll do, then X, Y, or Z will happen, which means my response must be . . . “. That pattern in turn, helps us in our fight for rigorous thought because it forces us to consider not only what we want to do, but how those desires work in our larger context, and helps us aim for concrete conclusions instead of merely speculative, useless thinking that goes nowhere.