I read today of a daughter struggling to come to terms with her mother’s terrible death from cancer. And what was it, she said, that finally allowed her to wrestle her own death-defying outrage to the ground? Truth, she said, the cold, hard reality of the place of death in human life.

A friend of mine grew up with a con man of a father, whose dizzying change of masks confused his own family as much as outsiders. How did she learn to cope and stand against his lies and deceptions? Truth, she said, the solid reality that was her only shield against insanity. Out of this private hell, she became a tigress for truth, which later led her to become a distinguished journalist, a field where such truth is still valued.

What is it that victims of injustice burn with desire for most? Justice through truth—and if not justice, then at least truth. Truth that tells the unvarnished story of the wrongs that were done to them. Hence the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, with their searing stories, and sometimes miraculous forgiveness, from countries that have gone through oppression and massacres. Without truth there can be no justice and reconciliation.

Pablo Picasso was a genius of an artist, but a monster of a man, whom friends called the Minotaur because of his relentless destruction of the women in his life. Of his many wives and mistresses, only one survived his maniacal, devouring personality intact. How? Through truth, she said. By every day, like Joan of Arc, putting on “the armor” of truth. Armed with truth, she could not be manipulated.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a one-man dissident movement, who more than any other single person gave the shout that set off the avalanche that brought down the Soviet Union and its tyranny. And how did he do it? In his own stirring words when given the Nobel Prize, “One word of truth outweighs the entire world.”

Truth Is Dead

How could anyone read such stories and think that truth does not matter? Yet we in the West are in a crazy time when many live as if truth does not matter, and many even claim there is no such thing as truth. The technical term for this philosophy is postmodernism, a loose grab bag of ideas whose central theme is that we can no longer believe in traditional ideas of objective truth.

At best, these people say, all truth claims are said to be relative. They depend on our perspective, and where we are coming from—we all see things differently according to our gender, age, race, and class. At worst, there is no such thing as truth, because what we call “truth” is really a disguised bid for power. Our challenge, they tell us, is not to worry about the truth or falsity of anything, but to figure out each person’s “agenda” and “where he is coming from.”

Truth Matters

Isn’t truth an issue for philosophers to settle, and irrelevant to the rest of us? Not at all. Truth can certainly be discussed at head-spinning levels. But just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so truth is too important to be left to the philosophers. And the arguments for taking truth seriously are urgent and very practical.

Photo: courtesy of HarperOne

One argument is straightforward, if negative. Without truth, we are all vulnerable to manipulation. If there is no truth, and everything is a matter of power, then might makes right, victory goes to the strong, and the weak go to the wall. From our instinctive hatred of bullying in the schoolyard to our instant outrage at the oppression of the weak and defenseless, we know that such things are wrong. But as the above stories show, it takes truth to stand against power.

Another argument is less obvious but positive. Without truth there is no human dignity or freedom. To anyone who thinks about it, freedom is not just negative, a matter of being free from something, such as chains, captivity, or control. That is only the beginning. Freedom is also freedom for something—the freedom to be what we are meant to be.

But that, of course, raises the question of who we are and what we were meant to be. Are we just accidents, “dust in the wind,” as many atheists believe? Are we machines, determined completely by our genes, as certain scientists claim? Or are we made in the image of God, with inalienable dignity as Jews and Christians believe? Obviously, you have to know the truth of who you are to be free to be who you are. Without truth, there is no freedom.

And the Truth Will Set You Free

If you were to think about it, there are numerous areas of life that assume and require a tough-minded view of truth: from honest communication, to good human relations, to virtues such as authenticity, to scientific discovery, to journalism, to the struggle for human rights, to justice and democracy, and so on. Far from casual and inconsequential, truth is foundational to a good life and vital and precious to each of us.

But where can such a high view of truth be found and based? Certainly not in modern philosophy, and not in pure science either. Evolution by itself, we are told, favors deception as much as truth-telling. Curiously, the clue is on our university walls, for the most popular university motto in the Western world comes from the words of Jesus of Nazareth. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

In the biblical—or Jewish and Christian view—truth is ultimate because God is the true one. We can throw on him the full weight of our lives because his character is true and his word is true, so he can be trusted. Only in a God of truth can we know the reality of truth that can set us free and be the foundation for a good life for each of us as well as for our human flourishing together. With such truth, the challenge is not just to know the truth, but to be a person of truth and to live the truth. Truth is anything but a trifle.

Os Guinness is the author of The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It (HarperOne, 2008). This article is ©Dr. Os Guinness.