Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Destruction of Mistruth

My hometown was shocked this past week by the horrendous murder of an expectant mother. Another woman had befriended her, was taking her to a doctor’s appointment, then apparently killed her and cut the child from the mother’s womb, trying to pass off the child as her own when she took it to the hospital. It is difficult to comprehend how someone could reach the point of carrying out such a barbaric act, though one pointer is claims she had been making. She had been (falsely) telling the young mother, neighbors and others that she was pregnant, even buying baby things, and it seems that efforts to maintain her “truth” led to the destruction of another family.

There is a disturbing trend in our society of being cavalier about truth and basing it more on what one’s group thinks than any external reality. At one end, it can be seen in prevalent academic theories that assert that the only “truth” is what the reader or the group decides there is in a text or history. At the other end, there are politicians making claims and crafting legislation based on “facts” generated by talk shows and related circles. Underlying all of this is a great arrogance, dismissing or demonizing those who disagree, where “being right” is more about winning the social battle than really understanding the world we live in. And now this attitude seems to even be creeping into what would seem to be the last defenders of Truth, which should make us all afraid.

As both a scientist and a Christian, I am connected to two groups that continue to claim their respective truths are not human inventions but based on an external reality—the physical world and God, respectively. Yet the clashes between the two groups over issues such as origins are legendary, and I am troubled by how quickly both sides are often to resort to strategies that cheapen Truth. For example one prominent radio preacher (John MacArthur) states that “evolution is not scientific. Evolution is not reasonable.” In other words, he claims greater expertise on what “science” is than thousands of scientists, who apparently suffer from limited reasoning capacity. On the other side, Richard Dawkins has called those who don’t believe in evolution “ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” What bothers me is not the passion—whether or not the world has a creator is an extremely important question. Rather it is how quick many on both sides are to dismiss arguments they disagree with by focusing on the motivation of the others, using double standards for evidence, or simply ignoring them rather than do the hard work of studying the opponent’s arguments to separate the truth from the error.

It is often much easier to employ arguments to undermine the integrity and truth claims of the opponent than to take them seriously and counter them. But the more we undermine the truth of the other, the more we tend to undermine truth itself. Truly seeking the truth requires humility where we are willing to admit we could be wrong about some things and may never know everything. I pray that we be a little less concerned about being right, and more on understanding truth, before we kill Truth and leave ourselves orphans.