In his book The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, David Berlinski quotes militant atheist Richard Dawkins as saying that religion's power to provide solace does not prove that it is true. When I read that quote my immediate, visceral reaction was "oh yes it does!" As I thought about that reaction I realized that the most fundamental difference between Dawkins and me on this point is probably not that we disagree about the truth of religion (although of course we do) but that we disagree about what it means to say that something is true. At John 18:38 Pilate asks Jesus "What is truth?" Pilate may not have been asking that question at a foundational philosophical level, but much disagreement in the world today, and much of the difficulty that many people have with religion, results from our unwillingness to consider the meaning of truth at that foundational philosophical level. The question of what it means to say that something is true is one of the most important questions we can ask today, yet it is one that is rarely asked. We tend to assume that we know what it means, and we assume that everyone means the same thing by it. Yet it is of vital importance that we examine these assumptions more closely. When we do, we might be surprised by what we find.
Almost everyone today understands the meaning of truth in a specific and very narrow way. The common understanding of truth today is a product of the European Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those sweeping and immensely powerful intellectual movements produced a major shift in the meaning of truth. Before those movements truth tended to have several different layers of meaning. We see these different meanings in the way the early theologians of Christianity understood the truth of the Bible. Theologians such as Origen taught that there are different layers of truth in the Bible. The first and most basic layer of truth was the factual layer. The early Christians did understand the Bible as factually true. Karen Armstrong gets this fact wrong in her book The Case; for God, where she tends to underestimate the extent to which pre-modern Christians understood the Bible factually. They did, but they did not consider factual truth to be the only truth in the Bible, nor did they consider it to be the most important truth. Origen and others taught that the Bible also contains a level of truth that they called "allegorical." The allegorical meaning was a non-literal meaning. It was what we would call metaphorical or mythic meaning. It was meaning, or truth, that resides in the text beyond the literal, factual meaning of the text. The allegorical was the level of meaning, of inspiration, and of spiritual rather than factual truth. Origen and the others considered the allegorical truth of scripture to be much more important, much more profound, than the mere factual truth that scripture also contained. The allegorical truth off a Bible passage did not, for them, depend on the factual truth of the passage. It was truth that came from a spiritual openness to the text, a willingness to see beyond the mere facts of a passage and to open oneself to deeper spiritual truth.
Let me give one quick example. Origen had no interest in the factual meaning of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in chapters two and three of Genesis. In fact, in that instance he denied the factual truth of the story. Yet the story has profound mythic meaning. It is a story of God as Creator. It is a story about the human striving to be like God and the dangers of that striving. It is a myth that seeks to explain the pain and difficulty of human life. It is a story that attempts to explain how the typical relationship in the ancient world between men and women came to be. It is, in other words, a story with multiple allegorical or mythic meanings that do not depend upon the factual truth of the story.
Western culture tended to lose its openness to the allegorical, its openness to mythic and symbolic meaning, in the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that was a part of it. As science and reason expanded the human understanding of and ability to control the human environment, truth got reduced to fact, specifically to scientific, logical fact. The power of scientific fact, a power that we do not deny and that has produced both great good and great destructive force, led people to see all truth as factual truth. Christian thinkers wanted the truth of faith to be the same order of truth as the powerful truth of science. People began to read the Bible only as fact. This development reached its highest point in Protestant Christian Fundamentalism, a development of the early twentieth century that radically reduced the Bible to factual truth. Christian Fundamentalism and all of the literal approaches to scripture that have been influenced by it cling desperately to the factual truth of the Bible because, like the scientific atheists who so viciously attack religion, they know of no truth other than mere factual truth. The so-called new atheists say religion is false because the Bible is not factually true. Christian literalists, who should perhaps more accurately be called factualists, agree with the assumption that the atheists make that all truth is factual, that if the Bible is true at all it must be factually true and that if it is not factually true it is not true at all.
Yet of course the Bible is, in many of its particulars, not factually true. The creation myths of the first three chapters of Genesis, for example, do not describe how creation took place as a matter of fact. They are not scientific or historic descriptions of events. Science establishes that truth beyond reasonable doubt. If the only truth is factual truth, as both the Fundamentalists and the scientific atheists insist, then the atheists are right. The Bible is simply not true in significant aspects. Because of the central role the Bible plays in Christianity, if the only truth is factual truth, Christianity is not true. Neither is any other religious tradition, because their foundational scriptures aren’t factually true either. In that respect the scientific atheists are right. So the issue for people of faith necessarily becomes: Is there more than one kind of truth. Is there truth other than factual truth? The answer is: Of course there is. To an explanation of that answer we will turn in Part 2.
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