Truth, Intelligibility, and the Physical World

Introduction

In this paper, I will examine how we come to affirm truth and how it is necessary to have reliable knowledge of the physical world. Even though natural science cannot objectively explain moral truths, make aesthetic judgments, determine the appropriate use of scientific knowledge, explain mathematical truths and affirm philosophical presuppositions about reality,[1] theological truths, or confirm or disprove supernatural realities, it is one of the most effective tools for comprehending physical reality, despite its provisional nature and limited scope.

Throughout this paper, I argue that the universe’s intelligibility, ultimately grounded in the existence and action of a transcendent mind, is the foundation for the success and possibility of the natural sciences and reason itself. In support of this argument, I will develop and defend the following propositions: 1) It is possible to have reliable knowledge of the world; 2) The correspondence theory of truth is the most adequate theory of truth in comparison to other competing theories of truth;[2] 3) Mathematics is an indispensable tool that is presupposed by the natural sciences and for understanding the physical world; 4) There is an inherent capacity for humans to inch their way closer to a more complete understanding of truth; and 5) Theism is foundational to understanding physical reality and the applicability of mathematics to the physical world since intelligibility is derived from an Intelligence, otherwise known as God.

Philosophical Issues in Discerning Truth

Truth Denial

We live in an era where the denial of not only the ability to discern what is true from what is false runs rampant, but also the rejection of objective truth itself. Interestingly, everyone speaks about truth, whether it is politicians, doctors, journalists, celebrities, athletes, academics, or the common person, but rarely are they capable of providing a succinct definition of truth. Admittedly, when the question is scrutinized philosophically, it is not an easy task. Nevertheless, all too often, in common parlance, the truth is intended to be or referred to as something that is possessed or owned; for example, the truth is referred to as being my truth, your truth, their truth, or our truth. And all too often we hear the mantra, “That is your opinion,” or statements such as “That may be true for you, but not for me,” which inherently is meant to shut down any further discussion. After all, if truth is based on subjective experience, who is to tell you that you are wrong? For example, whenever my daughter repeats such lines, I respond, “Some opinions may be better than others, and furthermore, some may actually correspond with the truth and how things actually are.” I vividly recall, as a master’s student at this very university,^[3] one of my professors uttering in a lecture that there was no such thing as truth. When I questioned her as to whether that was true, she responded that she meant that there was no “truth with a capital T.” Then I pressed her further and asked her whether that statement was true, but regrettably, the point seemed to be lost on her. In the end, for this and other reasons, I did not press the issue any further.

The Doctrine of Equal Validity

Another common issue, in addition to truth denial, is the constructivist idea of the doctrine of equal validity. This epistemological outlook can be best summarized in the following way: “There are many radically different, yet “equally valid” ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them.”^[4]  Although demonstrably incoherent, it is a view that has become widespread throughout the academy and popular culture. Philosopher Paul A. Boghossian, in his book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, explains why this doctrine has wide-reaching implications for epistemology in particular and philosophy and society in general:

Equal validity, then, is a doctrine of considerable significance and not just within the confines of the ivory tower. If the vast number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences who subscribe to it are right, we are not merely making a philosophical mistake of interest to a small number of specialists in the theory of knowledge; we have fundamentally misconceived the principles by which society ought to be organized. There is more than the usual urgency, then, to the question whether they are right.^[5]

Now, holding on to these strange ideas may come from a place of good intention, such as some virtuous reasons to uphold social justice in their minds, however muddled and confused that may be, but it is a misstep in critical thinking.[6]  This is why Boghossian provides a book-length refutation of such views. This challenge of affirming objective truth is vital to all endeavours in life, not just academic pursuits. If all viewpoints and outlooks are equally valid, then it is impossible to ascertain truth and even attempt to attain reliable knowledge of the world.  To be sure, these are repackaged arguments articulated over 2,400 years ago by the pre-Socratic sophist philosopher Protagoras, who asserted that man is the measure of all things.

Some Theories of Truth

The claim that objective truth does not exist is a self-contradictory one, since to deny its existence is to affirm it. Similarly, the claim that all positions are equally valid is demonstrably false. This is a matter of basic logic. Unless one is a metaphysical subjectivist, constructivist, and/or postmodernist, such a claim is uncontroversial; either way, it is incontrovertible regardless of one’s beliefs. There is no escaping this fact. Aristotle stated this very succinctly: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” ^[7] Without this, it would be impossible to have any reliable knowledge of the world or even any proximation or inkling toward how things may actually be. 

The most notable, commonly held, and commonsensical theory of truth is the correspondence theory of truth (or what is known as metaphysical realism). Under this theory, a proposition is true if it corresponds with the facts, where x is true if and only if x corresponds to a fact. Other widely discussed theories of truth among philosophers include the coherence theory of truth (where x is true if and only if x is a member of a coherent set of beliefs), the verificationist theory (where x is true if and only if x is provable, or verifiable in an empirical sense under ideal conditions), the pragmatist theory (where x is true if and only if x is useful to believe), and deflationary theories of truth, including the semantic theory of truth[8] (where we can say that the sentence ‘el cielo es azul’ is true if, and only if, the sky is blue), and others.^[9] It is important to note that deflationary theories of truth (deflationism) is not a theory of truth in the traditional sense, but rather a newer and distinct approach to the subject. There are two main threads that run through deflationism:

(a) that all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ or of the concept of truth in our talk and thought, and (b) that, by contrast with what traditional views assume, this role is neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory.[10]

Given these discussions, things can become complex very quickly, especially when taking into consideration deflationary theories of truth. Consider the difficulties that arise when we ponder what the nature of a “fact” is and whether there are distinctions between brute facts,^[11] general facts, negative facts, and hypothetical facts^[12] for instance. This, in turn, raises the complex issue of the nature of propositions and their relation to facts. As philosophers Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons indicate:

Some have taken propositions to be creatures of the mind, for only thinkers think things that are true or false. But what then is this complex in the mind that represents facts outside of it? Others take propositions to be abstract structures, but then we would need to know both how the structure corresponds with the facts, and also how the mind gets into a judgmental relationship to the complex. Still others hope to dispense with propositions in favour of sentences.^[13]

Going further, if one holds the view that a fact is a true proposition, then critics of the correspondence theory of truth argue that it cannot be sentences, statements, or beliefs. Facts can then possibly be considered abstract entities expressed in or designated by sentences.^[14] Furthermore, there are distinctions between facts, theories, and values, and they are also to be distinguished from objects, complexes, relations, and wholes.^[15] For example, a theory can never become a fact since it is set to explain a particular fact or series of facts.

There are also two related problems that arise, i.e., one is that of circularity, and the other is the problem of an infinite regress. The problem of circularity emphasizes the fact that truth is ultimately indefinable because it relies on a tautological definition. Conversely, if truth is definable, then we are left with the impossible undertaking of discerning the truth values of “infinitely many distinct propositions,”[16] and since we can sometimes decide that a proposition is true, then again, truth is indefinable. Thus, in order to transcend subjective language games, we need a way of speaking about truth that can deliver us from tautological statements and regresses. Consider Aquinas’s approach of aligning the intellect with the object. Aquinas argues that truth applies to both thoughts and judgments, just as it does to things and persons.[17] Aquinas argues further that a thought is true because it conforms to reality, however, a person is true since it conforms to an idea or thought (even though the latter has been largely abandoned by modern philosophers).[18] This move by Aquinas serves as an example of how to bring truth out of the realm of language and into the realm of Being, i.e., of persons, things, judgments, and thoughts.

            Nevertheless, there are also other substantive counterarguments to each of these theories of truth that challenge the correspondence theory.^[19] The fruit of these theories is that they force us to be very specific in the language we choose to use to develop our arguments. These objections do not undermine the validity of the correspondence theory of truth; rather, they just raise more questions that require clarification and objections that require adequate responses. Here are some counterarguments to consider for each of these theories. Each treatment could occupy a large volume; thus, our treatment will be brief, so we can clear the landscape for the central argument of this paper.

One of the significant problems with the coherence theory of truth is that the term “coherence” is never accurately defined.[20] Typically, what is said is that two or more beliefs cohere if they “agree” with or “fit” with one another, so something is true as long as a set of beliefs “agree” with one another or “fit together.” Related to this is an additional objection, which is known as the specification objection.[21] For instance, if we take three differing views on evolution and creation, one could argue that Young Earth Creationism may be comprised of a coherent set of beliefs if one accepts a number of presuppositions and that this is equally true for Old Earth Creationism and Theistic Evolution. However, nothing within the coherence theory of truth makes it impossible for these differing sets of beliefs to all be internally coherent; i.e., given the coherentist framework, there is no way of affirming that one view is true and that the other two are false. Such a position violates the law of non-contradiction since there can only be one complete set of truths, and therefore the coherentist must provide a way of outlining how these sets of beliefs do not contradict one another. Although different, the coherence theory of truth in this context bears some semblance to the abovementioned doctrine of equal validity, insofar as they suffer from the same objection.[22]

The pragmatist theory asserts that a proposition is true if it is useful to believe. However, it may be useful for one person to believe a certain proposition and likewise useful for another to disbelieve it. Take, for instance, that some people take comfort in believing in a personal God, while others would be disturbed that there is an immaterial and omniscient being who keeps a record of our actions and thoughts, so by symmetry of the argument, the proposition is rendered false and violates the law of non-contradiction.

The verificationist theory is severely undercut when one takes its criteria for truth on its own terms and asks if a sentence is only true if the proposition within it can be verified empirically; this is revealed to be self-refuting since that sentence itself cannot be verified empirically. Consider, for example, the following statement: “Statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically verified.” Empirical verification is impossible for such a statement, making it self-refuting.

The semantic theory[23] makes truth an issue of linguistics and alleges that there is no issue so long as you define the parameters, axioms, and terms from the beginning. But some critics would argue that is merely definitional and seemingly tautological. Many philosophers find other deflationary theories of truth attractive since they provide a simplified definition of truth and a description of the meaning and function of what is “true.” [24]  Deflationists allege that truth does not have a nature, and assigning truth a nature does nothing to justify the truth of a claim like the sky is blue. Deflationists also claim that truth is not a property, so if a proposition is true, then it is a mistake to state that the proposition has the property of being true, but interestingly, in another way, they do not deny that propositions have the property of being true. For instance, consider two of the following propositions:

• 1) Ottawa is the capital of Canada.
• 2) A water molecule has three atoms: 2 hydrogen (H) atoms and 1 oxygen (O) atom.

Now they do not deny that these statements are both true, but they deny that they are of the same kind. When we say two propositions share a property, X, we typically mean that they are both X, but they would argue that the truth of the first proposition has to do with the political history of Canada while the other has to do with the chemical properties of water, which have nothing to do with one another. They would argue further that since there is no shared explanation as to why each proposition is true, they do not have a property in common. 

            This method of analysis raises further questions, such as:

• What does our understanding of “true” consist of?
• How can one explain the meaning of “true” using a limited system of thought?^[25]

I believe the answer to these questions delivers a severe blow to many deflationary theories of truth. One of the main problems with deflationary theory is the description of what is “true.”[26] According to logician Anil Gupta, deflationary theories need to make very strong claims about what is true. This approach, which is demanded by such theories, is highly problematic upon closer examination. Whereas the weaker sense of what is true gives more plausibility to deflationary theories, he argues that they cannot produce any deflationary conclusions.[27] The ontological commitments and metalanguage that the deflationist seeks to avoid at all costs are inescapable, as Oxford philosopher Jonny Thomson recognizes: “The problem is that these truth-making rules are themselves expressed in the language that needs truth-making. As such, we need some kind of metalanguage to define truth.”[28]

As demonstrated through this exercise, one of the major challenges throughout the history of human thought has been our ability to make correct affirmations of the world, whether it pertains to historical, scientific, medical, philosophical, theological, or other forms of knowledge. In other words, attempting to understand reality as it is is no simple feat.

Given the state of all these competing theories of truth and if we take into account the criticisms of each, considering which theory best explains the available information, we can make an inference to the best explanation and opt for the best competing theory. Thus, the correspondence theory is one that is best capable of explaining truth while avoiding the pitfalls of the rest and is therefore conducive to scientific inquiry while incorporating the use of logic and mathematics as justifications for scientific claims. Having now addressed some contemporary philosophical issues, I would like to present an argument that demonstrates that we do indeed have reliable knowledge of truth and how it applies to the physical world.

Mathematics and the Physical World: Happy Coincidence or Design?

It is important to point out that the evolution of human thought and knowledge is a testament to our belief in things that have been shown to be false[29] or, at the very least, an incomplete picture of the world. It is an evolving enterprise in many respects. This is to be expected since human thought is finite and limited in scope. This by no means undermines the use of the correspondence theory of truth, but rather is a testament to its use and the self-correcting nature of ascertaining truth. This is reflected in science and every mode of thought. To complicate matters even more, over the past hundred years or so, with the advent of quantum mechanics (QM) and the many interpretations of it, the realization of the complexity of this problem of truth discernment has only increased. For instance, although intuitively it does not make sense to the human mind how an object can be located in two places at once or how a particle can also be a wave at the same time, it is vital for physicists to accept this in order to be able to unlock the usefulness of quantum theory. However, this should not deter us from making affirmations about the world. It is important to note that the experimental predictions of quantum mechanics have been confirmed to an incredibly high degree of precision. An example of this is how quantum electrodynamics (QED) has been shown to agree with experiments to within 1 part in 108 for some atomic properties. Despite the difficulty, in certain contexts, of attaining accurate knowledge of the world, I will argue that it is possible in the world of mathematics and its applicability to understanding and discovering the structure of the physical universe.

The closest tools to ascertaining truth are found in mathematics and formal logic. Bertrand Russell put it this way:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.^[30]

Russell argued that in order to describe the world adequately, in must be done in a way that we are not misguided by the accidental and imprecise nature of natural languages, as he states in his book The Scientific Outlook, which is a work that examines the nature and breadth of scientific knowledge: “Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.”[31]

It is rather remarkable how mathematics corresponds so neatly with the physical world. The Hungarian-American theoretical and mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner recognized this strange coincidence when he stated: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”^[32]

Contrary to Wigner, I will contend that this correspondence between mathematics and the natural world is not an undeserved happy accident that we do not understand, nor is it an accident as Russell posited with “logical atomism,”[33] but rather one we would anticipate given Christian theism, which holds that an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God created the world. And that the universe is created in such a way that it can be unravelled by humanity. God, understood as such, functions as a guarantor for reliable knowledge of the world. Both Russell and Wigner, despite their acknowledgement of the importance of mathematics, physics, and the universe’s orderliness, failed to provide a reasonable explanation for not only truth but also the comprehensibility, discoverability, and this very orderliness found in mathematics and its applicability to the world.

Jacques Maritain, on the other hand, recognized the obvious, but obviously not so obvious to modern ears, namely that “if nature were not intelligible there would be no science.”[34] He then rightly alludes to this grounding of intelligibility when he asks, “Now how would things be intelligible if they did not proceed from an intelligence?”[35] His analysis continues by affirming a transcendent mind when he states:

In the last analysis a Prime Intelligence must exist, which is itself Intellection and Intelligibility in pure act, and which is the first principle of the intelligibility and essences of things, and causes order to exist in them, as well an infinitely complex network of regular relationships, whose fundamental mysterious unity our reason dreams of rediscovering in its own way.[36]

Historically, it is the very belief in the Christian doctrine of creation that acts as a guarantor for the rationality of the universe that scientists can unravel. The universe is dependent on God and wholly other than God, a belief that allowed for the rise of modern science.^[37] As the physicist and theologian Robert John Russell explains:

Historians and philosophers of science have shown in detail how the doctrine of creation ex nihilo played an important role in the rise of modern science by combining the Greek assumption of the rationality of the world with the theological assumption that the world is contingent. Together these helped give birth to the empirical method and the use of mathematics to represent natural processes.^[38]

Essential to this line of argumentation is the understanding that our intelligence and our capacity to understand the complete and unbounded intelligibility are finite. In other words, humanity’s intellect is able to understand nature because of an eternal transcendent mind’s creation, which functions as a blueprint for physical reality. The fact that we are able to formulate general laws of science, use mathematics and logic, possess the ability to communicate, and discern truth in its various manifestations is a reflection of an unbounded intelligibility—the sort of thing we should expect if there is any correspondence between reality and our minds. There is a functional relationship between the precision and orderliness found in nature and our ability to understand it mathematically.

The assumptions regarding the intelligibility and rationality of reality shaped much of the empiricism in science, as did the use of mathematics to describe the processes found in nature. Indeed, modern science was deeply inspired by theological insights and understanding. This is especially true of great scientific minds such as Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and Nicolaus Copernicus, who posited that the structure of physical reality was knowable. These explicitly theological ideas—according to which there is intelligibility and comprehensibility in reality because of God’s role as Creator—inspired scientists to adopt a type of reverse engineering mode of thinking (where humans could possibly even modify and perfect creation) in order to understand how things were created (this was precisely the mode of thinking practiced by Isaac Newton). It should come as no surprise that humans have mimicked a dragonfly’s ability to fly in any direction (up, down, forward, backward), or even just hover, in the design of helicopters and their directional abilities.[39] In a similar way, although we did not know it at the time we initially developed computers, DNA has information-carrying properties that are like computers. We needed powerful tools like electron microscopes to be able to see these things in microorganisms and realize that they live in a world with much more advanced technology than our own. This, in turn, has helped us further develop our understanding and development of computer systems. It should come as no surprise that Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates observed in his book The Road Ahead that “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”[40]

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies, in a similar fashion to Eugene Wigner, ponders why it is that our minds are able to discover mathematical truths that underscore the book of nature. In his book, The Mind of God, he states the following:

The mystery in all this is that human intellectual powers are presumably determined by biological evolution, and have absolutely no connection with doing science. Our brains have evolved in response to environmental pressures, such as the ability to hunt, avoid predators, dodge falling objects, etc. What has this got to do with discovering the laws of electromagnetism or the structure of the atom? John Barrow is also mystified: “Why should our cognitive processes have tuned themselves to such an extravagant quest as the understanding of the entire Universe?” he asks. “Why should it be us? None of the sophisticated ideas involved appear to offer any selective advantage to be exploited during the pre-conscious period of our evolution. . .  How fortuitous that our minds (or at least the minds of some) should be poised to fathom the depths of Nature’s secrets.^[41]

In their book The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards lay out a scientific argument with deep metaphysical implications.[42] They provide a host of different lines of evidence to suggest that the Earth occupies a special place in the cosmos. Their argument provides different layers of fine-tuning that require the mathematical precision of a razor’s edge. Their argument also goes against the popular notion held by many scientists and that was popularized by Carl Sagan—namely, that the Earth does not have a special or unique place in the universe. Instead, Sagan said that it was just a “pale blue dot,” or a small accident in the universe.[43] His book and the saying were inspired by a famous photograph taken of Earth on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe, which depicts Earth as an insignificant point in the vastness of the universe. 

This is strongly connected to the misnamed Copernican Principle,^[44] namely the idea that the Earth is not the center of the universe and humans as observers, do not occupy a special place, a position widespread and unquestionably accepted by cosmologists, which Gonzalez and Richards refute. Gonzalez and Richards argue that there is a deep correlation between habitability and scientific observability. In other words, the fact that we exist on a particularly special type of planet (i.e., Earth) is also related to the fact that we are in such a place with a purpose to observe the universe and discover, measure, and understand much of the cosmos. They provide examples of the correlation between habitability and measurability. Effectively, Gonzalez and Richards argue that rather than the universe being merely elusively habitable and amenable to scientific research, the rarest locations in the cosmos that are most conducive to complex life and observers are also, on the whole, the best sites for scientific discovery. Furthermore, they contend that this is not just a happy coincidence but rather proof of a “cosmic conspiracy.” Their mission was to compare their theory with the most reliable data available from natural science. These findings and observations provide a cumulative argument that supports their privilege planet hypothesis. Thus, Richards and Gonzalez scientifically demonstrate the intelligibility of the correspondence theory of truth.

It is remarkable that one discovery piggybacks on the next. For example, without Newtonian Mechanics, the General Theory of Relativity would be practically inconceivable to humans. It is what philosopher of physics Robin Collins has dubbed “hierarchical simplicity.”[45] It seems as though our limitations of knowledge were instantiated by God through a feedback mechanism in the universe until we acquire a certain level of understanding to progress to a higher level of knowledge, much like the student in math who requires comfortable knowledge in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry prior to being able to understand calculus. The history of thought is no different.

Mathematical physicist Alexey Burov and philosopher Lev Burov, citing Eugene Wigner, point out that it is a mistake to think of scientific progress as one mistake after the next, but rather as one discovery being augmented upon the next.[46] They explain this in terms of asymptotic precision:

The law discovered earlier still gets to keep its power not only as a convenient, simpler and often more than sufficiently precise formula but, moreover, as an exact mathematical asymptote of the law of the next level. Classical mechanics, for example, is an exact mathematical limit of the relativistic mechanics when the speed of light approaches infinity; it is also an asymptote of quantum mechanics when the Planck constant tends to zero… The adequate characterization of laws is not approximation but asymptotic exactness… But many of their asymptotically-exact formulations on several levels are already known, and deeper asymptotes may yet be discovered.[47]

Naturalistic outlooks cannot explain this great affinity between the correspondence of our minds to understand nature, i.e., that the universe is intelligible through applying mathematics to physical existence. Any hypothesis devoid of Divine Mind has to be written off as either a happy coincidence or, inexplicably, the result of necessity, as a brute fact without further explanation, regardless of the evidence against it. Such explanations have weak explanatory power. It is not only our ability to understand nature mathematically but also our ability to create and design things that point us in the direction of a transcendent mind that acts as the reason for all these possibilities.

Conclusion

The correspondence theory of truth is the most adequate one amongst its competitors to make affirmations about the world. The competing theories of truth, particularly deflationary theories, neglect that there is something intuitive, incredibly simple, yet also mysterious about truth that causes wonder about the nature of reality and how we come to understand it. Similarly, these competing theories tell us nothing about intelligibility, comprehensibility, or the discoverability of the world. The correspondence theory necessarily makes sense in light of our example from mathematics to describe the physical world. It gives us grounding for the scientific endeavour and the use of mathematics and logic. Although, as a species, we have made many errors throughout the course of history, this does not preclude our ability to ascertain truth and discover and understand nature. This is to be expected since, in our current fallen noetic state, we do not have a perfect and comprehensive understanding of the completeness of truth[48] (actually far from it) and have only learned part of the mystery and truth behind the universe and God, something that is to be expected for finite beings. As time passes, and with God as the source of comprehensibility and the sustainer of all reality, we are able to inch our way closer to truths that have yet to be unraveled. This does not take away from the remarkable ability we have had to discern many aspects of physical reality through elegantly simple equations in physics, one predicated on the previous theory, as our minds gradually discover these truths.

Now, if we venture even beyond that of the scientific and philosophical pursuit into a more profound and ultramundane reality, we enter into the realm of the eternally transcendent, where we encounter the most mysterious of all truths, its personification in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, who boldly claimed, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6); a truth that grounds all truths. Thus, truth is neither owned nor possessed, as our culture based on subjectivism and relativism would have us believe, but rather transcends the subjective realm of the human mind, the scientific endeavour, and the physical world, even though it is manifested and entrenched within it. For Christians, truth is ultimately grounded in the person of Jesus and the Trinitarian godhead, and that reality makes all the difference in not only understanding truth and the universe but also our place in it, as we become active participants created in the image-likeness of the Creator.

[1] What I do not mean in the context of this paper is to examine whether I can trust my sensory perception, raise skepticism about phenomenal experiences, or question the reality of the world outside of my mind. Although important, I do not intend to engage in debates about Cartesian demon thought experiments, Platonic cave illusions, cosmological explanations like the Boltzmann brain thought experiment, hypotheses about physical reality being a simulation, or varieties of solipsism. 

[2] Karl Schlechta, “A Reliability Theory of Truth,” HAL (December 24, 2017), https://hal.science/hal-01672320.

[3] Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

[4] Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2.

[5] Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, 5.

[6] Troubled by this abandonment of truth, Boghossian, over the ensuing years, has continued his crusade to combat this irrationality that has become widespread in academia. Other scholars, such as philosopher Peter Boghossian (not to be confused with Paul Boghossian), mathematician James Lindsay, and sociologist Helen Pluckrose, in the spirit of Alan Sokal’s 1996 “hoax,” which was published in the journal Social Text, themselves published a series of papers in journals dedicated to “grievance studies,” i.e., studies that complain about unfair treatment of the allegedly marginalized in society through postcolonial theory, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectional feminism, fat studies, etc., exposed the lack of scholarship and absurd claims that these journals publish. In 2020, Pluckrose and Lindsay published a book on the whole scandal; see Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020). For Sokal’s “hoax” paper, see Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217–252.

[7] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011b25.

[8] Jonny Thomson, “The philosopher Tarski on truth: “Snow is white” is true only if snow is white,” Big Think, November 4, 2021, https://bigthink.com/thinking/tarski-truth-theory/. Thomson considers the quintessential semantic theory of truth as developed by logician Alfred Tarski a form of deflationism, since Tarski believed that “truth is a property of sentences, and not just states of affairs or the world…”

[9] For a couple of introductions to theories of truth, see Richard Kirkham, Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Bradley Dowden and Norman Swartz, “Truth,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer Reviewed Academic Resource, https://iep.utm.edu/truth/#:~:text=The%20three%20most%20widely%20accepted,%5Bv%5D%20the%20Pragmatic%20Theory%20, accessed October 26, 2023.

[10] Bradley Armour-Garb and James Woodbridge, “Deflationism About Truth,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/#:~:text=The%20main%20idea%20of%20the,this%20role%20is%20neither%20metaphysically/, accessed October June 24, 2024.

[11] G. E. M, Anscombe, “On Brute Facts,” Analysis 18 (1958): 69–72.

[12] Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons, Introduction in Truth, eds. Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1.

[13] Eds. Blackburn and Simmons, Introduction in Truth, 2.

[14] Kevin Mulligan and Fabrice Correia, “Facts,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/#FactProp, accessed October 22, 2023.Marian David, “The Correspondence Theory of Truth,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/, accessed October June 24, 2024.

[15] Mulligan and Correia, “Facts.”

[16] Scott Soames, Understanding Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25.

[17] Marian David, “The Correspondence Theory of Truth,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/, accessed October June 24, 2024.We will return to this notion of truth pertaining to persons, as it does to Christ, nearing the conclusion of the paper.

[18] David, “The Correspondence Theory of Truth.”

[19] Joshua Rasmussen, Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[20] Richard L. Kirkham, “Truth, coherence theory of,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998), accessed November 3, 2023, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/truth-coherence-theory-of/v-1.

[21] Bertrand Russell, “On the Nature of Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 7 (1907): 228–49.

[22] The difference with the doctrine of equal validity is that it won’t account for coherence; for all intents and purposes, in how it is used, there is a carefree attitude towards truth and coherence.

[23] Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, IV (1944): 341-375; Alred Tarski, “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in, ed. Alfred Tarski Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938 (Oxford, Oxford University, 1958).

[24] See Scott Soames, Understanding Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[25] Anil Gupta, “A Critique of Deflationism,” in Truth, eds. Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 307.

[26] Bradley Armour Garb and James Woodbridge, “Deflationism About Truth,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/#TrutMean, accessed October 26, 2023.

[27] Gupta, “A Critique of Deflationism,” 284.

[28] Jonny Thomson, “The philosopher Tarski on truth: “Snow is white” is true only if snow is white.”

[29] See Jospeh Jastrow, ed., The Story of Human Error (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1967).

[30] Bertrand Russell, “The Study of Mathematics,” The New Quarterly 1 (Nov 1907) (Repr. Philosophical Essays, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910).

[31] Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (New York: W.W. Norton, 1931), 82.

[32] Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1960): 14.

[33] See David Bostock, Russell’s Logical Atomism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[34] Jacques Maritain, On the Use of Philosophy: Three Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 65.

[35] Maritain, On the Use of Philosophy, 66.

[36] Maritain, On the Use of Philosophy, 66.

[37] Scott D. G. Ventureyra, On the Origin of Consciousness: An Exploration through the Lens of the Christian Conception of God and Creation (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock), 65.

[38] Russell, “Eschatology and Scientific Cosmology: From Conflict to Interaction,” in What God Knows: Time, Eternity and Divine Knowledge, edited by J. Stanley Mattson and Harry Lee Poe (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press: 2006), 105.

[39] Scott Ventureyra, “Transcending the Evolution-Creation Debate,” Crisis Magazine, April 12, 2023, https://scottventureyra.com/transcending-the-evolution-creation-debate/.

[40] Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (NY: Viking Penguin, 1995), 228.

[41] Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York: Simon

& Schuster, 1992), 149.

[42] See Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Richards. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the

Cosmos is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004).

[43] Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random

House, 1994).

[44] Lisa Zyga, “A Test of the Copernican Principle,” Phys.org, May 22, 2008, https://phys.org/news/2008-05-copernican-principle.html.

[45] Gonzales and Richards, The Privileged Planet, 214.

[46] Alexey Burov and Len Burov, “The Metaphysical Status of Physical Laws,” Plato in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times, eds. Mark Nyvlt and John Finamore (Lydney, UK: Prometheus Trust, 2020), 134.

[47] Burov and Burov, “The Metaphysical Status of Physical Laws,” 134.

[48] Maritain, On the Use of Philosophy, 65. Maritain was quick to recognize this often-ignored fact about intelligibility, one where the expectation of perfect intelligibility is unreasonably held.