Truth is correspondence with reality.  That’s the definition of truth, and for those who believe in evolution, there can be no other definition.  For all living beings, including us people, our ways of living, thinking, feeling, have evolved to work in our world.  Our minds map to reality, and if they didn’t, we’d be dead. 

 

You say, “OK, truth is correspondence with reality, but tell me, sir, what’s reality?”  I agree, that’s the real question.  If I know what reality is in any given context, then I’ll know the truth of it.  The problem is that reality is really complex; it’s multi-dimensional, overflowing, moving, changing, and nestled in context and a web of relationships.  Harder still, reality requires a conscious mind to know what it is, and to do so, that conscious mind must frame reality within a worldview and metaphysical construct.  Which means that truth depends, to some degree, on one’s perspective.

 

Witness a 2022 Jordan Peterson podcast featuring Richard Dawkins as the guest.  It was your typical interview by Dr. Peterson: he jumps around at a thousand miles per hour and the guest tries to keep up.  One topic, though, kept getting caught between the two Drs like a fishbone in the throat-- truth.  It began when Dr. Peterson spoke of primordial tribes who, while tripping on psychedelics, could see reality at a cosmic level then down to a molecular level, maybe even down to DNA.  Dr. Dawkins would have none of it.  He said (in his courteous and precise manner), that’s “got to be false,” and “you’re drunk on symbolism.”  Dr. Dawkins said, “let me tell you something that is true, we are cousins of chimpanzees, that is objectively true, another thing that’s true is that the earth orbits the sun… I want to be a realist about this… there are objective truths and it’s the business of science to find them….”  

 

Here’s what happened.  Both Drs believe that truth exists (and that it’s sacred), but they differ on reality.  Dr. Peterson inhabits a broad reality that encompasses matter and spirit, science and myth, and a Jungian nether-world in between, and correspondingly, he permits a broad range of truth.  Dr. Dawkins, however, accepts only a narrow, materialist reality.  For Dr. Dawkins, something is true only when it has a material basis revealed by empirical observation and which is expressible in mathematics, and correspondingly, he permits only a narrow and precise range of truth.  Dr. Dawkins therefore dismissed as poetic nonsense any statement from Dr. Peterson that exceeded Dr. Dawkins’ narrow vision of reality.  Their conversation about truth didn’t connect because they were talking from different worldviews about different aspects of reality. 

 

I side with Dr. Peterson.  For my part, I believe that reality is matter and spirit, wherein some truths correspond to matter and other truths correspond to spirit, and wherein the Bach Chaconne is true to some things and Einstein’s relativity is true to other things.  Take memory as an example.  My memory of a past event won’t accurately reflect the objective facts of the event, rather, it’ll be a mish-mash of some facts and some meaning about the event.  I have a memory of first love: is the memory about the woman or about my youth which is gone forever?  The memory is more than the remembered facts: it integrates the facts of my first girlfriend, plus me as I was then, plus an older me grieving what’s lost (and being overly sentimental).  The memory has degrees of truth in multiple aspects of reality. 

 

Do you see what I did?  Instead of asking whether my memory reflects the facts of what happened (which is a narrow aspect of the relevant reality), I asked about the full reality to which the memory speaks.  The memory is true, but the issue is, to what?  It’s true to all of it: my first girlfriend, my lost youth and my excessive sentimentality. 

 

Seen from this perspective, everything is true, but true to what?  For years I’ve been telling my children that a person’s lies tell more truth about him than anything else he could say.  The lie is true to what’s hidden.    

 

Dr. Dawkins’ statements are true, but only to that aspect of reality that consists of matter in motion.  To say that his statements are exclusively true is to cut reality down to fit inside a little box.  I’m reminded of a character from Herman Wouk’s novel, Marjorie Morningstar.  The character, Noel Airman, was a dashing and brilliant actor and playwright, with great promise and potential.  The young protagonist, Marjorie, fell in love with him.