Opus 2026-307: Filtering Search Results

One of my recurring themes is truth.  What is truth?  How do you find it?  How do you recognize it when you see it?  These are age old questions which philosophers and Roman governors have been asking since men asked questions.

The first question that must be answered deals with what is truth.  This would have at least two responses.  For me and other Christians the ultimate truth is found in the Bible and in Jesus.  If you are a garden variety pagan the answer is a little more difficult but still something you would search out.

The other response would be found in what we might call the world of science, or what we believe the world of science is supposed to be about.  This would include bodies of knowledge like mathematics.  It is a search for statements that can be matched with real world observations.  Thus we might say that water freezes at 32̊.  You would then check it out to see if it was a true statement and in most cases would find it false.  Why?  Because the statement is not exact enough.  I would suggest “Pure water freezes at 32̊ Fahrenheit at sea level.”  There might even be a few other details I missed but you see the difference.  Scientific truth is when the statement matches the empirical evidence.  I hope that science gets back to that standard during my lifetime.

Truth in our culture is hard to find.  Now I am thinking about the things we hear and read.  It can be a conversation overheard on a park bench or a statement found in a respected reference book.  In our day and age it is almost impossible to correlate what we hear with what is.  The news media is bad enough but the problem extends even to such pillars of truth as dictionaries.  They are being rewritten on a regular basis.  Advances in computer science have made things like Photo-Shop obsolete and it becomes difficult to tell computer generated content from real living actors.

This is where it comes home to me.  How do I know if what I am being exposed to is true?  

There are different types of truth that I reject.

One rejection is for people who know they are lying.

One is for people who pass on false information because it is all they know.

The difficult sources who are accurate most of the time until it touches one of their hot buttons.

A variation of this is the frog warmer who starts off on target but slowly begins to tweak the truth to get you where he wants you.

It may be that I will never be able to cut through the clutter of deception in the news world.  I am not sure that I need to.  Did the apostle Paul need to know what was happening between the Roman Empire and the Parthians?  Did he need to know about the grain harvest in North Africa?  Not really.  It does not mean that I don’t keep looking for truth and recognizing lies but it does mean I leave the final analysis in God’s hands.

homo unius libri