What is "truth" and how is it used in religion and science?
It seems to me that "truth" is frequently used by religions to give their religion some special backing but we then get to the which truth do you use.
SO what is the truth? How does one decide what is truth?
Are the words Truth and true different? Are they used differently?
ranma1/2:
Those are important questions, which I think Karl Popper answered amazingly well. His main point was that there are two different types of “truth” corresponding to the two different types of systems, “open” vs. “closed”.
The distinction between open vs. closed systems is the same as in science: open systems permit exchanges with their environment; closed systems don’t. Examples of open systems include cells, organs, human bodies, school systems, legal systems, health-care systems, transportation systems, and so on, including essentially every system in reality – including science and including reality, itself! As you may know, Popper was a strong advocate of open economic and political systems, which is what he called “open societies”.
Closed systems, in contrast, aren’t modified by their environment. Examples of closed systems include all games, pure mathematics, and essentially all religions. Communism attempted to be a closed economic system; any theocracy attempts to be closed political system; but experience has shown that it’s difficult to maintain closed societies (especially now that “we the people” can use the internet).
The difference in the meaning for “truth” in open vs. closed systems is critical. For closed systems, “truth” can be firmly established. For example, in poker a flush always beats a straight (regardless of the location, time of day, etc., i.e., regardless of the environment), in baseball it’s three strikes and you’re out, and so on for all games. Similarly, in pure (as opposed to applied) math, 1 + 1 = 2, the interior angles of a plane triangle sum to 180°, and so on, are always “true”, by definition. And so on it goes for all closed systems: Superman is invulnerable to everything but kryptonite, Moses parted the Reed Sea, Mary gave birth to Jesus by immaculate conception, Muhammad received messages from Gabriel, Joseph Smith translated the Golden Bible, and so on. The “proof” of the “truth” of all those statements can be found in the respective “holy books” (including the rule book for any game, any pure math text, any Superman comic book, and so on).
For open systems, however – in reality – we can never demonstrate “the truth” of anything (even of that statement!), because we never know what might arise around “the next bend” in either space or time (or space time). Instead, truth (and similarly, falsification) can be approached only asymptotically. For example, after literally millions of experimental tests, it does seem that the principles of mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc. seem to be approaching the truth (e.g., that total electrical charge, energy, and momentum are always conserved), but who knows: tomorrow someone might demonstrate that one or more of those scientific principles (formerly called “laws”) are false.
As for you question “How does one decide what is truth?”, that’s where Popper stumbled a little. His idea (known as “Popper’s Principle”) is that science (i.e., knowledge) progresses with falsifiable hypotheses not yet falsified. That’s an appropriate statement, but he left the impression that there was an asymmetry in demonstrating what’s true vs. false: that we can approach “truth” only asymptotically but we can reject something as false relatively easily. Bayes’ method shows, however, that the process of verification and falsification are symmetric.
If you’re interested, I include an introduction to Bayes’ method in Chapter Ih of my book (see
http://zenofzero.net/docs/IhHypothesesandProbabilities.pdf ). I also include a discussion of “truth” in Chapter T (dealing with “Truth”) and show the extension of Popper’s principle in Chapter U (dealing with “Uncertainties”), but I haven’t yet posted those chapters. If you want to see draft copies, please contact me.
well, true to me, anyway.
