Well although I’m not an atheist I would like to “hear ” your thoughts on this.In the recent past I heard a conversation with a preacher from the US about TRUTH.He strongly argued that truth is just like a coin hence always has two sides.My problem with that view is this:What if I view truth as a cube? It would have mmm,six sides? Now the big question is:Is truth relative or not? I thought truth is just that :truth!
How can one extrapolate this statement made by somebody? :”Although it seems easier to exclude all but one possibility, and thus resolve all uncertainty, often more than one thing is true at the same time. Indeed, most Bible doctrines have two apparently opposing ‘faces’. For example, God is love, but also He hates evil; God is One but has three persons; we are saved by God’s grace alone, but also we must exercise faith to believe in what Christ has done for us on the cross; we live in a corrupted world, but this is not our home; one day we will die, but those who are in Christ will live forever; we are saved by God’s grace through faith and no good works can contribute to our salvation, but faith without works is dead. And there are many other examples. Attempting to resolve each tension will produce a heresy either by excluding one of the truths or by merging them together in a way which removes the potency of each truth.”
Pontius Pilate once asked Jesus: "What is truth?" The trouble was that he never stuck around for the answer. You are correct-Truth by nature is exclusive. One can readily see this by a word experiment: Suppose someone makes the proposition: "There is no such thing as absolute truth" If that was taken as true then that statement is contradicting itself because in saying "there is no such thing" it is itself an absolute statement, therefore it self-destructs. This proves truth exists, and that it is exclusive. Truth can be simply expressed as "that which corresponds to reality" Truth claims or propositions can be tested with the laws of logic or rational thought. The most widely used being the laws of non-contradiction. Simply stated they go like this:
1. the law of non-contradiction (A is not non-A),
2.the law of identity (A is A),and
3.the law of excluded middle (either A or non-A)
To relate to the metaphors of truth as a coin or as a cube, truth is not determined by majority vote. People today think in relativistic terms saying what is true for you is your personal truth but isn't necessarily true for me. An easy way to settle this is to ask: "Ok if I sell you goods worth $20 and you pay with a $50 note, is it okay to give you $5 change? After all this is true for me, too bad if it isn't for you, we both have different realities, tough!" No, when it comes to mathematical realities we soon see the exclusive nature of truth, why should we see philosophical or religious truth any differently? Go here for further discussion on Relativism.
What we have to be careful about is the difference between contradiction and contrariety. Many things appear as contradictions when in fact they are merely contrarieties. In scientific terms, light is seen as a wave, and experiments can verify this as empirically true, trouble is light can also be experimentally proven as a particle, it appears they cannot be both (a contradiction- violating the law of logic), so what has happened is that a new view of light has encompassed the truth of both views which is how we get "photons".
Many views in philosophy and religion are treated as contradictions when in fact they can be reconciled. Opposing views held dogmatically tend to polarize people into either or camps. This fact alone is evidence of the exclusive nature of truth. People cling to what they believe to be true. However some things must be held in tension, or in balance. Observe a long straight railway line, according to our eyesight the two metal tracks converge to form a point in the distance. Our eyes tell us this, but our knowledge and experience of perspective knows that any idea of convergence wouldn't just derail our thinking it would also derail the train! Jesus said not to judge by appearances. In Bible doctrines there is often what appears to be opposing views, or what look like contradictions when in fact they are merely contrarieties. To cite your examples:
"God is love, but also He hates evil"But when "love" is properly defined, not according to human sentimentality but according to and in reference to the holiness of God, we see it would be evil not to hate evil. Hating certain things then becomes a function of love rather than the antipathy of love. A creed which defines "love" as the ultimate criterion for life but does not adequately define love, ends up tolerant of every evil; but virtue- as the compliment hypocrisy honours it with shows- is rejected, for it is jealously exclusive. And thus as David Hume once said, the corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
"God is one, but has three persons".The doctrine of the trinity is not a contradiction in terms, God is one- in one sense and three in another sense. This is not a contradiction in terms. God is one in terms of essence, but not in terms of personality.
Take the picture of the Morpho Rhetenor at the top of this post. It is a beautiful metallic blue color, is it not? Well actually it is not. What?! While it is perfectly true in one sense it is blue, in another sense it is not blue, there is in fact, no blue pigment in the surface scales of the moth. We know that ordinary white light is actually made up of the colors of the rainbow. blue being a part of the spectrum. Here again we must not judge according to appearances. The butterfly appears blue as a result of an effect known as interference, this filtering of the light that is hitting its scales results in light that is not blue being absorbed and blue light reflectivity is enhanced. In this way we see that there is no contradiction (blue, and not blue)depending on whether by "blue" we are referring to actual blue pigmentation or the appearance of blue due to reflectivity. To speak in plainer terms- would you call a mirror blue because it was giving you a reflection of a clear blue sky- obviously not! So the difference is qualified by whether we are speaking in general terms or in more scientific terms. Interestingly, this was brought to my attention in a book by Werner Gitt, called: In the Beginning was Information. In this book the results of information science makes clear the idea of intelligence as a prerequisite for information whether in computer code or in DNA, just as Perry has stated in Cosmic Fingerprints. It is the intelligence behind DNA that engineered the moth scales to a
"pattern ...repeated so accurately that the maximum deviation is only 0.00002mm."
As with the problem of Love and hate with God, so too, with the trinity. If we measure love in human terms then we will have difficulty reconciling God hating, for example, Esau. But who has a right to determine the meaning of love? God or humanity? When it comes to the trinity we can say that according to mathematical certainty one cannot be three. But we are not speaking in terms of maths, God is one, in one sense, and three in another. To say that God cannot be one and yet three persons is to measure God according to a human ruler.
C.S. Lewis wrote:
“[T]he mysterious something which is behind all things must be more than a person…something superpersonal…The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.”“As you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you don't leave behind the things you found on simpler levels; you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you couldn't imagine if you knew only the simpler levels…On the Divine level, you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being…Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube.”When thinking about the Trinity, we should not think it is an impossible contradiction or bad math (1+1+1=1). The idea is that there are three distinct persons, so tightly knit together that the three are united as one being. "Being" is something different than "person." We do not know exactly how, and these words are no more than imperfect analogies to our human experience. All we can say is that the life of God is both more complicated and simpler than the human experience. There is both unity and diversity in the being of God; God is "the One who lives as three." And to a large extent, we must be content with not knowing how this works. After all, we are talking about God; we cannot expect our minds to be capable of fully grasping the infinite.Ravi Zacharias postulates:
The only way to explain unity and diversity in the effect is if you've got unity and diversity in the first cause. And Only in the trinity is there unity and diversity in the community of the Trinity.
Isaiah 40:18 says:
"To whom, then, will you compare God? What image will you compare him to?"and Isaiah 46.5:
"To whom will you compare me or count me equal? To whom will you liken me that we may be compared?"If we measure God in human terms then we "create" a god in our image. Man, then, is the measure of all things including God! This is the nature of humanism. In all our posturings about God we must guard against the danger of anthropomorphisms. The purpose of C.S. Lewis's book "God In The Dock" (as the title shows) is the ultimate temerity of humanism- when God is brought before the bar of human understanding.
The trinity may be beyond our grasp of logic but isn't necessarily antithetical to it. We merely concede that the trinity may be beyond our grasp as finite humans but not necessarily contradictory of logic.
Abdullah says:
"Attempting to resolve each tension will produce a heresy either by excluding one of the truths or by merging them together in a way which removes the potency of each truth.”When we allow contrarieties to polarize us it may indeed as you say end in heresy, but as followers of truth we ought to make the effort to resolve these, but where there is definite paradox which does not contradict logic but goes beyond our ability to describe it we have to submit to the infinite knowledge of the most high God and acknowledge our own limitations. One of the most difficult anomalies is the tension between the human will and the sovereignty of God. Human freedom is guaranteed by the fact that "We love God" Intrinsic to the definition of love is that it cannot be forced or compelled. And yet God is ultimate being, therefore His plans cannot be hindered or his will thwarted. The only way to understand this is to see that one is absolute the other contingent.
The Coalescence of Contrarieties (Part One)
The Coalescence of Contrarieties (Part Two)
For further reading see the post:http://struth-his-or-yours.blogspot.com/2011/04/moral-relativism.html
The Following is part of a discussion that can be found at: Cosmic Fingerprints
Abdullah says: