Sermon by Tom Are Jr. | September 29, 2024 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 29, 2024

Truth Known and Truth Believed (Don’t Confuse Them!)

from the sermon series:
"What Being Presbyterian Teaches Us about Good Governance"

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Psalm 15
John 18:33–38

Young George Washington chopped down his father’s cherry tree. When confronted, George responded, “I cannot tell a lie; it is I who chopped down the cherry tree.” It’s a wonderful story. But historians believe it is apocryphal. So, ironically, the story we tell to encourage truth telling is not true.

So why do we tell it? A couple of reasons. One is we know that telling the truth often requires courage. We also know that telling the truth is the only way communities can live together. Apart from truth telling, trust erodes, and communities fall apart. Maybe you have experienced that in your own relationships. It can happen in church families. It’s true in nations. Truth is the ligament that holds the communal body together.

In 1972 NASA launched Pioneer 10, a spacecraft with the power to escape the solar system. By November of 1973 it was sending pictures of Jupiter. The last time it was heard from was 2003, as it was on its way to the Aldebaran star (the star that is the eye of the constellation Taurus). It will take 2 million years to reach Aldebaran. In a first for NASA, Pioneer 10 was prepared for the possibility that she might be intercepted by intelligent life. An aluminum plaque was attached to the spacecraft with messages for whoever might be out there. If you were tasked with designing that plaque, what would you say? And more importantly, how would you say it? It’s unlikely intelligent life beyond the solar system will be fluent in English. Is there a language that would be recognized across the universe? NASA thought so. The plaque showed the layout of our solar system, our location in the Milky Way galaxy, and the structure of the hydrogen atom (Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, pp. 38–40).

In 1977 the spacecraft Voyager was launched, and it included a gold record album containing sounds of the human heartbeat, whale songs, and musical selections, including the works of Beethoven and Chuck Berry (Tyson, pp. 38–40).

Shortly after this launch, Saturday Night Live did a skit in which they showed a written reply from intelligent life who recovered the spacecraft. The note simply requested “Send more Chuck Berry.”

But why the hydrogen atom and a layout of the solar system? As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, science is the universal language — literally. The laws of physics will be the same on a distant planet as they are here. If there is a way to communicate with alien life, it will be the truth we know through science (Tyson, pp. 38–40).

Jesus stood before Pilate, and Pilate asks, What is truth?

How would you answer Pilate’s question?

I suggest there is more than one answer to that question.

Theologians and philosophers speak of epistemology. A rather pedestrian definition of epistemology is it is the study of how we know what we know. In other words, not just what is true but how do you know the truth is true? There are different types of epistemologies. There is that which we know through science, and there is moral knowledge. There is mathematical truth, and there is religious truth. These are all knowable subjects, but how we ascertain their veracity varies (“Epistemology,” The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology).

I know 440 vibrations per second produces a pitch of A. I know Abraham Lincoln was a great president. I know “Abide with Me” is a beautiful hymn, and I know that Jesus Christ is Lord. I know all of these things, but the means by which I ascertain their truth varies. To say it simply, some truth is known. And some truth is believed, known only through conviction. Both are legitimate and important. But they shouldn’t be confused.

The late seventeenth century introduced the Enlightenment. It included thinkers like Rene Descartes, who said, “I think, therefore I am.”

But Descartes did more than think. He changed the way we think. Descartes, and the rest of Enlightenment thinkers, questioned the epistemology of those who had gone before. For centuries, truth had been determined by tradition, culture, belief. Descartes said, “I don’t think so.” For Descartes, truth — capital-T Truth — is that which is factually true. That which can be discerned through the senses and that which can logically be deduced through reason. Capital-T Truth is that which can be plastered on a spacecraft and recognized as truth as far as the Aldebaran star.

Simply stated, the Enlightenment shifted our epistemology. Truth was no longer determined by tradition or culture but by facts alone. The Enlightenment taught us to speak of the science of evolution. That’s a factual conversation. But the Enlightenment had no language to speak of the world being created, by a creator, because that is a conversation that is bigger than the facts. It is not contrary to the facts. It’s just the facts don’t speak the whole truth.

In the West, we learned to trust facts.

Some began to read the Bible to discover what facts could be discovered. Who really wrote Leviticus? When was Mark written? Others, inspired by the Enlightenment, just insist it is all fact. They believe that the only way the Bible can be true is if it is factually true. So, they insist that creation happened in a week. They insist that Jonah spent the weekend in a fish. And they insist when Jesus returns, he will ride a cumulus cloud. This is the faith of fundamentalism. I suggest that they have gotten confused on their epistemology. They have confused that which is factually truth with that which is larger than fact — with meaning. It presents as a high level of confidence in scripture, but it actually just an unquestioning belief in Rene Descartes.

One example: Jesus stands before Pilate, and soon Jesus is tortured and crucified. These are the facts, and they are important. But knowing the facts is not enough.

Imagine you were there. You saw it all: the crown of thorns, the flogging, the pounding of the nails, the taunting, and finally his lifeless body. Imagine you saw it all. You would know what happened. You know the facts. But unless you could see beyond those facts and know that the love of God was redeeming the world, you would know what happened but you would not know what it means, because that truth is too big to squeeze into facts.

This is what I mean. Some truth we know. The Roman Empire crucified thousands, and Jesus was one of them. That’s a fact.

Some truth we believe. In his death, Jesus redeemed the world.

Both knowledge and belief or conviction are legitimate and important, but they are discerned through different epistemologies, which when confused can be dangerous.

I have spent most of my ministry inviting us to look beyond the simple facts of the story to the meaning of the story of our faith.

But recently the cultural ground has shifted. The ground has shifted, in part, because we live in an age of social media, where too often freedom of speech is exercised with very little consideration of the responsibility of speech.

The ground has shifted, because increasingly our sources of news have elevated commentary over reporting, and some have made no distinction between the two.

The ground has shifted, because artificial intelligence can teach us more than we can know on our own, but there are not sufficient guardrails to ensure AI doesn’t lie. So, for the first time in my ministry, I feel that it is important to say something I used to assume, and that is this: facts matter. They can’t tell the whole truth, but we do not endeavor to tell the truth without them.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former senator, ambassador, and presidential advisor, once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” Today that sentiment is contested daily.

Truth that is known by fact and truth that is believed by conviction are both important, but they are not the same. Today, particularly in our public life, many profess beliefs that are contrary to the facts. They do so as if such created narratives hold no negative consequences, but they are wrong. We can hold convictions that are larger than the facts, but we cannot hold convictions that are contrary to fact without damaging the community.

A few years ago, Time magazine asked “Is Truth Dead?” The article chronicles a number of statements, primarily regarding the rigged nature of the last election, claims asserted as truth that had no basis in fact (Time, 3 April 2017).

The Rand Corporation has released a recent report that they entitled “Truth Decay.” Michael Rich, President of the Rand Corporation, said, “This is to me … a dangerous and unusual time in history. Americans not only feel entitled to their opinions — and rightly so — but … a growing number of them … also feel entitled to cherry pick facts to support their opinion, or even commission up new ‘facts’ if necessary. … When everyone has their own facts, then nobody really has any facts at all” (“Truth Decay,” rand.org).

We experience this all the time. We witness today frequent conversations, as if beliefs contrary to facts matter more than the facts. People speak of vaccines or the reality of climate change, and often these conversations ignore scientific fact, even when the scientific community essentially provides consensus. People are saying the facts don’t matter; my belief matters more than fact.

A couple years ago, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry responded to an assertion that climate change was real by saying, “The science is not settled just because a group of scientists stand up and say, ‘Here is the fact.’” Remember, he said, “Galileo got outvoted for a spell” (Shawn Otto, The War on Science, p. 28). Well, yes, he did, but the sun didn’t start rotating around the earth after the vote. This is an example of confused epistemologies. When our convictions are contrary to fact, our conviction will not make things true. Facts matter.

There is truth that we know, and there is truth that we believe, and both are important. I believe that my children are remarkable, and I believe in the church, and I believe that Jesus is risen from the dead. None of which can I demonstrate factually. I am fine with that. But I am not fine believing that which is contrary to fact. The earth is not flat. The sun does not rotate around her. The carbon in the atmosphere is measurable. I can believe I am thirty-five years old and a scratch golfer, but my belief that is contrary to fact doesn’t make it true. In that case it’s a sad thing!

Both facts and beliefs have currency in our culture — and they should! But when we confuse our epistemologies and think beliefs and facts are interchangeable, the center no longer holds.

I don’t think anyone in this room, regardless of your party, celebrates when facts are ignored or denied or invented. None of us wants that. All politicians lie, but some appear to use deception as a political strategy. It is harmful — or to use our theological language, it is sinful.

In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass describes how Sophia, the wife of Hugh Auld, the man who claimed to own Douglass, was teaching Douglass to read. Auld insisted that Sophia stop educating Douglass or he would become no longer fit for his “station.” Douglass wrote, “In a flash of ‘revelation’ he realized that slavery’s evil consisted of attempts to shackle people’s minds as well as their bodies” thus Douglass was “seized with a determination to learn to read at any cost” (Jeffery Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, p. 243).

In an age of “Truth Decay,” too many have willingly shackled their minds. They believe they can invent any truth they wish. Such misinformation or disinformation — all language we use to make it sound nicer than simply lying — such lack of truth makes communal life impossible.

Speaking the truth is not always easy and often requires courage. Discerning the truth is almost never easy. So it is a spiritual practice to be relentless in pursuing the truth. We are wise to admit that every day there are those who wish to deceive us with falsehood. They may view that as a strategy, but it is not one that leads to good governance.

This is why we tell that story of the cherry tree. It reminds us that telling the truth requires courage but also that truth holds us together. And it is why truth is so important to Jesus — because truth is the ligament that holds the communal body together.