Note: This blog post is from my old Blogger site, before I switched over to tadukoo.github.io. As such, there may be references to the old blog rather than this current one.
I previously talked about the Tadukoo Bible Project. I mentioned that “any truth is God’s truth”. While that’s true, it has to be understood how you find truth.
How you find truth is a philosophical topic that is part of the study of epistemology. While it’s a very interesting topic to talk about with all the various philosophers and their ideas, I’m not going to go into detail about all that here, but I’ll present a bit of my experience in college philosophy.
Early on in the class, we talked about different kinds of relativism (ideas that certain contradictory truths could both be true). I wrote them down, noting how crazy they seemed and figured we’d discuss why they’re false. We didn’t. I can’t recall talking about any philosopher who accepted the obvious fact that absolute truth exists and that relativism is a joke. Let me clarify (since there are many varied definitions of relativism), that I am saying that to say two things are true at the same time in the same sense is a contradiction, and therefore false (e.g. Barack Obama is the current president is true now for me to say where I live, but is relative a bit due to its ambiguity; to say Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America in the year 2016 AD using the Gregorian calendar is true no matter what).
What I’m about to present is how to find truth once you are a Christian and have the Christian worldview. Obviously, your search for truth would necessarily be different if you had a different worldview and you would probably not use this method to come to the Christian worldview.
The Christian worldview first holds that God exists and is the source of any and all knowledge (and wisdom). Because of this, truth first comes from the mouth of God. The Bible is the Word of God, and so it is the primary source of knowledge.
After this, we can have personal revelation from God, which must be in agreement with the Bible, for we know of God’s nature that He doesn’t contradict Himself (which we learn from the Bible).
After revelations, we have the various studies of His handiwork, studies such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, psychology, and any other sciences or studies.
But we must make sure these are in agreement with the revelations received from God. Because of this, if a discovery is made in one of the sciences that apparently contradicts the Bible, it is questionable and needs further study before being accepted (if it is to be accepted). If further study confirms its truth, then either the Bible has been misunderstood or the discovery (or its confirmations) are in error. If it is truly found with certainty that something is true that contradicts the Bible (and it’s not merely that we mis-interpreted the Bible), then the whole Christian worldview collapses. This is one reason why apologetics exists to point out the false interpretations or falsehood of discoveries.