In Part 1 of this post titled What is Truth, which you will find immediately after this post and that you should read before you read this one, we saw that there must be more than one kind of truth if religion is to be in any sense true. The Bible is not factually true in significant respects. The claims of religion to be true cannot be understood in a narrow, factual sense. As fact religion makes no sense. As fact religion cannot in the long run be sustained. What other type of truth might there be that can sustain religion in the long run? To answer that question we must ask the question: How do human beings know that anything is true? How indeed do human beings know anything? These are complex questions, and for a more thorough (although hardly exhaustive) discussion of them please see my book Liberating Christianity, especially the Philosophical Appendix in that book. Here I can only give a brief recap of what I say there.
All human knowledge, and therefore all human truth, is grounded in human perception and experience. It cannot be otherwise. We are created as centered beings. From the center of our selves we perceive a world that appears to us to be a reality outside of ourselves. All we truly know is what we perceive, what we experience, what comes to us through our senses, what we feel or sense in our minds in response to what we perceive with our senses. We cannot get outside of ourselves to perceive any reality as objective. We can perceive reality only as subjective, that is, from inside ourselves as perceiving subjects perceiving a world that appears to be outside of ourselves.
So what does that mean about the nature of truth? It means that all truth is necessarily grounded in human perception, in human experience because human perception and human experience are all we have. That is true which we perceive as true, which we experience as true. The first step in discerning the nature of truth is to realize that that which we perceive or experience is true for us. But we need a qualification here. Sometimes people perceive things in ways that are not confirmed by the perception or experience of other people and that function in the person's life in a destructive way. The most obvious example is mental illness, in which people can hear or see things that no one else hears or sees or perceive the world, or themselves, in ways that no one else shares. Those perceptions often cause a person with mental illness to act in ways that are destructive to the person or to others. The qualification that we need to the statement that that is true which we perceive or experience as true is that for the perception or experience to be true it must not function in a harmful way and it should be shared by other humans, indeed it should be the experience of humanity generally or at least of a significant part of humanity generally. We say then that that is true which we perceive or experience when that perception is not idiosyncratic and does not function in a harmful way.
All truth is therefore subjective. People today generally believe that scientific truth is objective, absolutely verifiable truth. It is not. It is not because it too is grounded in human perception. The human mind constructs a world on the basis of what it perceives and experiences, as Hume and Kant so powerfully explained; and science is a powerful tool for manipulating that world. But it too is solidly grounded in human perception. That perception may be aided by various technologies, but in the end science, like every other human mental activity, is a human mind acting on the data of perception and experience.
Since all human truth is subjective, it does not disprove the truth of religion to say that it is subjective. It is, but that is not what distinguishes it from other kinds of truth. What distinguishes religious truth from scientific truth is not that it is subjective but that it is formed by the human mind acting subjectively on different kinds of data, on different kinds of experience, than science does. Religious truth is truth formed by the action of the human mind on spiritual experience rather than on the data of our usual sense perception. Spiritual experience is a universal type of human experience. Every human culture that we know of has included experiences of the spiritual dimension of reality. We know that because every human culture that we know of has its religion, has its myths, its stories of the gods, or of God, such stories being how humans express and try to make sense of their experience of the spiritual. The experience of the spiritual is real, but it is a different order of experience than our experience of what we perceive as an external physical world. Those of us who have experienced the spiritual know how real that experience is, but we also know how difficult it is to put that experience into words.
So indeed there is a different kind of truth than factual truth. There is the truth of spiritual experience, which is not factual but which is nonetheless true in the only way that anything can be true for human beings. It is grounded in experience, it is universal, and it is, when understood and used properly, constructive and live giving not destructive and life destroying. The militant atheists say the Bible is not factually true. We say: Yeah. So what? That doesn’t mean it isn’t true at all. It doesn’t mean that religion isn’t true. It doesn’t mean that Christianity is false. It means that we need to understand truth in a better way, a way that is more grounded in what it is to be human than is the reduction of truth to supposedly objective fact.
So what do we make of Dawkins’ statement that the power of religion to provide solace does not prove that it is true? We say that in a way it does prove that it is true. Not that religion is objectively true. There is no such thing as objective truth. Rather, we say that the experience that human beings have of the power of religion to provide solace (or any of the other spiritual gifts that religion can bring) is a true experience. We do indeed experience it. Humans across the cultures and across the millennia have experienced it. And it is life-giving. It makes life better. It helps us make it through the pain and sorrow that are an unavoidable part of human life. In those ways the power of religion to provide solace does prove that it is true. We just have to understand what “true” really means.
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