Perhaps,
the most egregious intellectual abomination in the eyes of the religious person
is moral relativism, “which
maintains that the basis of judgment is relative, differing according to
events, persons, etc.” (per the
definition of the Webster’s Dictionary). Most Christians, when asked, What
is truth? would automatically reply, Jesus Christ!, and no one would
dare to ask them, What else? In more general terms, God is truth!, that
is, the Absolute Truth, implying that there is only one Truth,
and this is final. This is the only logical foundation of absolute morality,
and the only way to refute moral relativism, that is, on the basis of moral
absolutism, arguing from the authority of religion.
And
yet, the Christian world did not stand up to the challenge of an ostensible
blasphemy, and succumbed, at least partly and very grudgingly, to the so-called
doctrine of double truth, which maintained precisely what it posited,
that there had to be more than one truth, but in fact two, namely, theological
truth and philosophical truth, and what was true in philosophy could be (but
not necessarily had to be so, as is often suggested) false in theology,
and vice versa.
This
purported abomination must have started with the great Arab thinker Averroes’
intellectual invasion of the Christian world, bearing the Aristotelian gift. And
just because Aristotle proved so desperately indispensable to Christian
scholasticism, epitomized by Saint Thomas Aquinas, the doctrine of double
truth could not be all that easily disposed of, and, even though
half-heartedly denounced, took root. Its prominent and reputable proponent in
later years was Francis Bacon, of the alleged “Knowledge is power!” fame.
(Here
is a fascinating subject well worth digging into not just for the historical
interest of the politics in the Middle Ages, but on its own philosophical
merit.)
“Francis Bacon held that philosophy
should be kept separate from theology, not intimately blended with it as in
scholasticism. He accepted orthodox religion, but, while believing that reason
was capable of proving God’s existence, he regarded everything else in theology
as known only by revelation. He further held that the triumph of faith is the
greatest when to the unaided reason a dogma appears most absurd. Philosophy,
however, should depend only upon reason. He was thus an advocate of the
doctrine of double truth, that of reason and that of revelation.” (Quoted, with minor modifications, from Lord Bertrand
Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.)
In
my view, this strange doctrine of double truth is not so much
intellectually incompetent or theologically blasphemous, as it is shockingly
awkward and needlessly offensive to the very religion, which it endeavors to
defend, even though this offensiveness has been disingenuously camouflaged by a
rude and unwarranted snub to philosophy, in its sub-doctrine of triumph of
faith. There is no glory, however, in such a defense. It ought to be clear
to any level-headed reviewer of this doctrine that pitching rational truth of
reason against the irrational truth of revelation upsets the necessary
philosophical harmony between reason and instinct, and disparages one of the attributes
of Divinity, which is, of course, Reason. On the other hand, putting on the
same scale these two incommensurate ‘truths,’ God’s Absolute Truth and
man’s oftentimes misleading experience, and faulty logic, linguistically unites
the Infinite and the finite in one non-judgmental phrase, and
thus may, in itself, amount to incompetence and blasphemy, which, I am sure,
has not been its original intent.
The
solution which I am offering to this conundrum of double truth, is to
take a step back and look at these again, from a fresh perspective. To start
with, let us leave God’s Absolute Truth alone here. It is essentially
unknowable and incomprehensible and, therefore, non-comparable to what we
commonly call truth in our everyday discourse. The truths which we
operate with are in their essence all hypotheses. If we say that two
parallel lines have no common points, we are promoting not a truth (which
this is not, in an absolute sense), but only a hypothesis. All science,
all human experience, all our deductions and inductions are based not on
truths, but on hypotheses, and we can cite a million examples of that, and none
to the contrary!
Curiously,
I can make a step further, suggesting that all religious dogmas are also hypotheses!
Therefore we cannot say that one great religious dogma is based on truth,
whereas all others, different from it even in the minutest detail, are based on
falsehood. As my own hypothesis (logically, this is also only a hypothesis!), I
could suggest that every great religion contains seeds of the Divine Truth,
and, perhaps, this Divine Truth is properly manifested in what all these Great
Religions have in common, while everything else is a collection of hypotheses.
This does not in any way diminish or infringe on my personal faith, nor on my
allegiance to the Russian Orthodox Religion, in which I was born, and in which
I shall die. As a matter of fact, I believe that even our personal faith is an
intellectual hypothesis on our part, in so far as the thinker and the
believer coexist as one within our human mind. And if this last statement
remains unclear to you, my reader, I invite you to take time and think some
more about it, confident that what I have in mind will eventually become to you
exhilaratingly apparent.
Meantime,
this is a good place for me, at the end of yet another entry dealing with the
question of “truth,” to reiterate my general assertion that by the same token
as the concept of “double-truth” borders on blasphemy and must be
vigorously refuted, the idea of multiple truth is by no means offensive,
as long as we are ready to acknowledge the truth of a particular creation,
which is true inherently within the said creation, but not as assuredly true
when projected externally, where it is most likely to clash with the truths of
other creations so that the end result is the creation of a lie. Learning to
deal with such multiple but limited truths, and keeping them well within the
boundaries of their limitations, indeed constitutes the best possible way of
dealing with the problem of multiple truths, while immediately exposing the
inadequacy of the artificial and intellectually corrupt concept of “double-truth.”
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