On Adler's The Great Ideas: Truth

In Chapter One of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Think about the Great Ideas, Adler deals with the Great Idea of Truth. Adler begins by defining truth as knowledge of what is, and separating man into several philosophical categories. He continues by showing the main disagreements between categories of thought, and concludes in his description of characteristics of truth.

His first category is the skeptic, who Adler defines as someone who believes that there is nothing true and nothing false, or that everything is equally true and false. While reading these categories, I attempted to discern where I fit into Adler's distinctions. Because I believe that truth exists, and that everything which does not completely agree with truth is completely false, I am not a skeptic as he defines one to be. His second category was described as the opposite of the skeptic, which is someone who believes that truth exists, and a grasp of the truth can be acquired. I believe that the category of the skeptic is the most common standpoint of most people in America today; especially considering what Adler mentioned regarding the philosophy of Sigmund Freud. Adler described Freud as believing that "no one has the right to accuse anyone else of error (2)." Because I believe that I fall into the category opposite the skeptic, I find that Freud's belief crashes against me quite often when I attempt to share what truth I believe in, contained in the Bible. Adler describes telling the truth to another person as making sure that one's mind matches the thoughts of another's. It is true that the most common way to do this is through verbal communication. However, Adler explains that in telling the truth, it is possible to be lying, because your mind may not match reality. Because I believe that the Bible is God's message of truth, and therefore is completely consistent with reality, I have the ability to compare what my mind thinks with reality, so I am able to speak the truth completely. Therefore, trying to tell the truth to skeptics proves extremely difficult, as many skeptics in America believe that no one has the right to accuse anyone of error, because no one knows what is right or what is wrong.

Adler's third category is the relativist. He defines the relativist as someone who believes that things can be true to one person, while false to another, and that what was once true at one time or one place, can now be false. The reason that I do not fit into this category is that I believe that truth is consistent and applies to everyone. Truth is an understanding of reality; of what is. The opposite category of the relativist is the view that truth is objective; that truth is absolute and is the same always and for everyone. I also fall into this category. The next category is the pragmatist, who believes that truth can be found in what we believe only if it works with how we think, or how we view the world. The opposite believes that man does not need this proof; that truth can be grasped by man without necessary verification. I agree; because man is faulty, we cannot find truth on our own, and when we compare what we think to be true with how we have been thinking in life, and find our thought to be in-congruent, we cannot know whether all we have believed before was false, and this new idea is true, or if everything we believed before was true, and this new idea is false. I, therefore, do not attempt to use my own reasoning to discover what is true and what is false, but base all of my ideas on the reality of God's Word. I must believe, first, that the Bible is inerrant and consistent and true, and then any idea I form I must take before the Bible and make sure that it is consistent. In any case that my thoughts or ideas do not match up with the Bible, they are automatically wrong. I realize that believing one book to be the basis of reality and to hold perfect truth seems inconceivable to many philosophers; however, to me, believing complete truth can be found through one's own reasoning, gathering evidence from our so easily deceived senses, is utterly foolish. Believing that the Bible is truth requires faith, but faith is also required to believe that anything at all is true.

Moving from his categories, Adler explains that the basic disagreements between each category are easy and hard, in two different ways. He points out two questions, "What is truth?" and "What is true?" I agree with what Adler described through his discussion of Josiah Royce; that truth is the opposite of a lie, and that a liar is "a man who willfully misplaces his ontological predicates (3)." I also agree with Adler as he points out that while speaking truthfully, making sure that one's thoughts match perfectly with another's, one can still lie if their thoughts did not first match with reality. Adler finds that the main problem between converting what one believes to be true from one's mind to another, and from reality into one's mind, is that in the former case, man has the ability to communicate between one another, and to gather by communication-including word choice and body language-that they have a correspondence of thought, while in the latter case, one cannot discern by communication whether or not their thoughts match reality. I understand Adler's point, but I also believe, as I previously stated, that Christians can use the Bible as truth, or a reality, by which they can compare their thoughts.

Adler's two final sections deal with characteristics of truth; that truth requires consistency, and that truth is immutable, or never-changing. I agree with Adler; one thought must agree with another thought that is known to be true for the first thought to be true. However, this does not work when trying a new thought in one's own mindset. One can find that a new thought does not match with what one has already discerned to be true, but it is impossible to know whether that new thought is false, or if everything else that they believed is false, or if both are false. In the Bible, we discover that some things do not seem to match. For example, the issue of predestination versus free will-that God planned out everyone's life, and knows everything that will happen to them, and that He gave everyone a choice of what they could do. Although in our minds, this may seem to say that the Bible contradicts itself, or that God, who is Truth, contradicts Himself, but one thing we must keep in mind is that as humans, we have not the capabilities of seeing truth in its entirety. Therefore, I agree that truth must be consistent throughout time and location, as well as throughout itself, but I also know that we can never understand truth completely. I know that God has created man with a desire to search for truth, and I know that He desires us to search for truth in Him, through His perfect Word.