Truth. A few things come to my mind about it. Somewhere it lies still, buried, waiting to be uncovered, set in stone.
But it takes work to find: how to uncover the truth? Observation. Analysis. Logic. Reason. Use your head.
I’ve been using my head my whole life, and trying my best to ignore the things my head tells me to ignore.
The older I get, the less I can ignore them.
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist. I’ve heard several interviews of his recently, mostly because I heard one, and then I sought out another, and so on. His expertise is on the two hemispheres of the brain. Traditionally, we have thought of the left brain as analytical, and the right as expressive, emotional, and creative. This is not quite right. Yes, the left is analytical, but not unemotional: it is where anger manifests in brain scans, for instance. Meanwhile, the right houses its own emotions, and yes, it is creative. But it is also where we take in the bigger picture of our experience and integrate it, mostly unconsciously. To use an eye metaphor (not again!), you might say that the left brain is what focuses our attention on one thing, and the right brain puts it into the context of our broader visual field. Put another way, the left brain is to our attention what the right brain is to our consciousness.
Although humanity often takes pride in its rationality, what McGilchrist is trying to do is to dethrone left-brain analytical thinking as our uniquely human gift. The right brain, the home of our intuition and our basic conscious (and unconscious) experience, is just as important, and particularly neglected in contemporary culture.
The left-hemispheric approach to the world is oriented toward ordering and controlling it. This is why it is our locus of focus: zooming in on one thing alone provides order to perception, and our hands are built to manipulate the world one thing at a time as well. A right-hemispheric approach, by contrast, is oriented toward experience, openness to possibilities, freedom, and change. McGilchrist says that modern Western culture has lost sight of the right-brained approach and put all its eggs in the basket of a left-brained understanding of the world. The modern rise of science and its attendant religion, scientism (which holds that science is the only way to the truth), has put this on display quite clearly.
Dead Truths
The Greek root of the word “analysis” means to break apart. We take things apart so we can figure out how they work. But in pulling things apart we pull them out of context, we make them hold still so we can examine them. We don’t want them squirming around, as that would obstruct our ability to turn them over and observe them in still detail. So we kill them.
The truths that left-brained scientific analysis produces—even aims at—are dead truths. A dead truth is true, yes, but it’s torn out of its environment, and it’s not doing the things that true things ought to be doing. Science wants a truth that can be handled, examined, experimented on, manipulated, controlled. Even when these truths help human life, as in the case of a medical advance like antibiotics, this is not because we have experienced these truths but killed and grasped them: dead truths are born of our own control, and often help us to exert still more control over our world.
This can be good. But the truth is not merely a lifeless instrument of control. And if we treat it as only that, then we impoverish the human experience. Beauty. Justice. Goodness. These are things that have their own truths, but not ones that can be killed and sanitized and studied scientifically, as truths of crude matter can.
Now we are on the turf of the right-brain, and the left-brain struggles in vain to extract propositional truth from the world regarding such truths. We can try to scientifically study what makes something appear beautiful, just, or good for “the average person”, and we might even effectively extract some dead, manipulable truths from this, and these might help us to engineer our environments, our social systems, and even our neighbors, so as to maximize goodness, beauty, or justice, in our collective life.
But this misses the point of such truths entirely. For the left brain must treat such truths as illusions we all suffer from, perhaps thanks to our evolutionary heritage. They are mere quirks of the human psyche. For when you only analyze, when you try your best to isolate these truths in a lifeless vacuum of abstraction, you only end up working with them as dead truths, and you don’t expect them to act like live truths. While dead truths might explain some things mechanistically, they are not alive to hit you. To do what they would do in their natural habitat: perhaps to produce awe and reverence, or to prompt ponderous meditation, to inspire love and loyalty, to invite appreciation and gratitude, to arouse a sense of wonder.
Living Truths
Only live truths can do these things. Live truths are often harder for the left-brain alone to comprehend, since they speak to our whole being instead. We feel them in our gut, in our conscience, in our unconscious, or sometimes they hit us right in the feels. When this kind of truth comes over you, it might even hit you in a place you didn’t realize you had—in a place you might call the spirit.
Yes, we seem to have some kind of antenna for live truths, but this is only discovered once a signal comes in, and only if we allow for the possibility that it might be true. Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, is doggedly committed to truth. But he also seems doggedly committed to the idea that truth is always inert, docile, sterile, dead, only to be accessed through dissections or reason alone. For him, it must be true that life arose out of a meaningless, purposeless process, because if anything else was true it would produce an unmanageable, uncontrollable amount of meaning and questions about such meaning.
It must also be true that the universe was formed out of a meaningless, purposeless process, for the same reason: it would be letting too much unscientific stuff into his cold, controlled, laboratory world. Anything that cannot be made sense of by analytical thinking must be an illusion. Even consciousness itself must be some kind of illusion, from the perspective of Dawkins’ strict materialism, even though this itself is a contradiction: one must be conscious to experience an illusion, no? In any case, a worldview that tells me that my own consciousness—the very bedrock of my own phenomenological experience, outside of which I can know nothing—is a lie…that worldview has to have gone wrong somewhere along the line. But I digress. The point is, I respect Dawkins’ commitment to the truth, but I think his conception of truth and how we can come to it is too narrow.
In one of my first posts I reflected on the existence of God, including the question of whether it is best to think of God in personal terms or otherwise. Many people have a tendency to shy away from the term God because it implies a personal being, and it seems awfully presumptuous to think that God must resemble us. Such people are often comfortable swapping in “the Universe” in place of God (even when “the Universe” does things that only persons do, like wanting or willing things). Fair enough. But one important difference is that persons are living beings who can communicate, and universes, at least as far as I can tell, are passive—we can learn from a universe, but only by studying it as a scientist would. (Parenthetically, I want to make clear that I think the whole scientific endeavor is worthwhile, and even flows naturally from a theistic conception of reality, as the history of science shows.)
Meanwhile, the question of God’s existence is not one that can be meaningfully answered by such scientific probing, at least not directly. A personal idea of God implies that truth hits us as persons, and not just as reasoners. If the universe is just the universe, we are left with science and reason to interrogate it. But if there is More, and if there is Someone responsible, then we might just expect Truth to speak to us not just through propositional statements and syllogisms, but through music, art, nature, meditation, conscience, our emotions, our own joys and sufferings, and even through other persons.
A Watertight Person
The idea of God as a Person takes on new meaning in a Christian context. Tim Keller tells the story of left-brained skeptic who told a pastor: “I would believe in God if you could give me a watertight argument.” The pastor tells him to read the New Testament. “OK, will I find a watertight argument there?” The pastor replies, “Not exactly. But what if God didn’t give us a watertight argument? What if God gave us a watertight Person, against whom there is no argument?” In Keller’s words, “there is no way to account for the beauty of this Person, unless He is who He says He is.”
The Incarnation itself points to the reality that Truth can best be communicated through the whole of a Person, and not only through words. The words of Christ are sublime, and worth pondering deeply. But they are not a convincing argument from reason. The life of Christ is the central argument. I’m no theologian, but perhaps Christ is called The Word (logos) because it is the Person Himself who does the convincing. Logos in Greek means word, discourse, or reason. If Reason became human, then we would expect more than a watertight argument. We should expect a watertight person, and that would hit us not just in our minds but in our everything.
Letting the Truth In
I’m showing my Christian cards here more than in the past, because I’m tired of the old academic habit of keeping the Truth at a distance. Dead truths are generally safe and unthreatening: they don’t demand anything from us except our intellectual assent to them. They are usually acceptable in polite company, they don’t usually require us to rethink our decisions or to reconsider our character, and they won’t judge us at the end of our lives. Living Truths, however, just might do those things. It is awfully tempting to keep them at arm’s length so we don’t have to deal with their incitements, implications, and imperatives, and so we don’t have to give them any power over us. But that is exactly their purpose.
To clarify, I’m not trying to pit reason versus intuition here. I’m saying that Truth comes to us via our whole experience, and not only through reason. Reason itself—its reliability, its origin, its watertightness—is amazing to ponder, but it is not the only antenna we have for truth. It is one of many. For much of my life my antennae have been out of sync. For instance, when your reason tells you one thing (say, that morality is merely a social construct) and your conscience tells you another, then one of them has to be wrong, and the conflict should be resolved. For once in my life it seems like reason, my intuition, my conscience, my struggles in life, the other people in my life—in sum, all my various spiritual antennae—are receiving similar signals more often than contradictory ones. And when Truth comes at you from that many angles, it becomes a living force with the power to shape you, even transform you. And really, what good is the truth if it does not make this kind of difference? Exciting, yes, but also frightening.
Moreover, Living Truth that demands things of you can be tested by, well, living. If you go beyond mere intellectual assent and actually accept the implications of what you believe and try to live by it, the proof should come out in the pudding. If one lives by the idea that life is fundamentally purposeless and meaningless, if that idea is true, then it should lead to the most fulfilling way to live. In other words, if truth is holistic as I’m saying, then the Truth at the level of mere proposition should lead to Truth in terms of the life one leads. I’m deeply skeptical that a belief that life is meaningless would lead to a good way of living, so this makes me skeptical of such a fundamental belief being true. From a holistic perspective, that’s a contradiction baked right into reality.
It is easy to criticize this line of thought through the pulling-apart that left-brain analysis does so well: “Just because something is true doesn’t mean believing it will lead to a fulfilling life—those are totally separate questions.” This is a fair point, but if there were Truth out there that was living and holistic, that spoke to us on multiple frequencies, you would want to know. What if we actually live in a world where the Truth can do this? A world where the most profound truths are not ugly and harsh and brutal, not in need of being covered up by some noble lie, but instead they are beautiful, just, good, and, well… true? It would certainly gel with a lot of the signals I’ve been receiving. And besides, you would never know until you tried. I think I’ll keep trying.