A Brief History of Absolute Truth
In the beginning, prophets (or priests) were the source of truth. What they said was binding upon all within their stewardship and beyond question. In this way, authority and revelation were two peas within the same pod. Since prophets had no competition, truth was thought to be single and unified, but only within the immediate context. Since different prophets have stewardship over different times and places, their truth was not universal and unchanging in any transcendent sense.
As the stewardships of these prophets expanded, it became practically necessary to record and transmit their words by writing. Thus, scribes came to be a derivative source of truth in that they interpreted the written word to those to sought access to prophetic guidance when there were no living prophets at hand. In was in this context that the words of prophets could and often did travel in space and time beyond their limited stewardships. Truth, then, began to appear more heterogeneous and at times conflictual. Within this context, the difference between living and dead prophets became blurry.
Unlike the living prophets themselves, their words that had been written down, reproduced and spread throughout a large part of the world were immortal. There thus arose and spread situations in which the words of two dead prophets were compared and contrasted with zero regard for the limitations in their spatio-temporal stewardships. Indeed, even living prophets came to be measured by the words of dead prophets whose stewardship no longer carried any authority. A systematic harmony was thus sought – although hardly achieved – through an appeal to the tools of the Socratic dialectic and Aristotelian logic. In this way, the hierarchy of people was replaced with a hierarchical logic in which certain beliefs and propositions are subordinated by others. The people who dedicated their lives to this systematic harmony were scholars and during the middle ages they became the guardians and sources of truth. During this time, truth was again perceived to be unified in an idealized other-worldly sense that was universal and unchanging in a way that was quite foreign to the Hebrew tradition. Of these scholars, Galileo famously wrote, “These people believe there is no truth to seek in nature, but only in the comparison of texts.”
In opposition to the never-ending and apparently unsuccessful attempts by scholastics at unifying the written word with Aristotelian logic, there arose yet another Greek mode of thought, this time inspired by Plato, Pythagoras and Euclid. This mode of thought totally rejected the endless war of words amongst the scholars, insisting instead upon an appeal to mathematical deduction. The truth of the universe was thus taken to be written in holy words and Euclidean geometry. This mathematical focus, later combined with experimentalism, was the main impetus for the rise of science and scientists as sources of truth. In this context, truth came to be seen as a mathematical mirror of mechanical nature which thus had one universal and unchanging solution. One can find no stronger of an advocate of this source for truth than in Leonardo da Vinci, “No human investigation can call itself true science unless it proceeds through mathematical demonstrations…. He who scorns the certainty of mathematics will not be able to silence sophistical theories which end only in a war of words… Where there is clamor there is not true knowledge, because truth has a single ending; and when that is made known the contest is ended forever.” (Frammenti letterari e filosofici, ed. E. Solmi, 85-95)
In the late 19th Century, Gottlob Frege invented the first new logic since Aristotle. The invention (and especially the empirical confirmation) of non-Euclidean geometries soon inspired several efforts at reducing all mathematics to this new logic in which we could now find unity and certainty. In this way, the rules of logical analysis were also able to bridge the mathematical models of science with everyday linguistics, thus serving not only to further establish science as a source of truth, but also to delegitimize other competing sources. (The logical positivists who sought to reduce all truth claims to logical claim that were transparently true or false to any audience by were the paradigmatic example of this.) In this way, the universal unity of truth that characterizes Euclidean geometry also characterized non-mathematical truths as well.
The table above gives a basic overview of how legitimate sources of truth have evolved over time. In particular, I would like to point out how each transition marked some degree of democratization of truth. In the prophetic tradition, the guardians of truth are limited to that small, ordained minority. Within the logical tradition, by contrast, the guardians of truth are taken to be any person that can recognize that A and ~A cannot both be true. (It is also very significant that the transformation of basic literacy to training in Aristotelian logic to mathematical prowess to basic logic itself constitutes an evolution in what is means to reason properly.) Unfortunately, the democratic flattening of the prophetic hierarchy also entail an equality of truths such that there is no longer any obvious reason why “the sky is blue” is any more or less true than “Jesus is the Christ.” John Herman Randall, Jr. summarized this shift, “The democracy of individual facts equal in rank had superseded the Aristotelian feudal system of an ordered gradation of unequal rank.” (The Making of the Modern Mind, p. 232)
There are so many other points that I think are worth discussing about this evolution, but I would prefer to keep this post as brief as possible. In the meantime, I think it useful to merely describe the changes in truth and reasoning as well as the actual problems that such changes were meant to be solutions to. It is also worth mentioning that I did not include post-modern, romantic and other relativistic conceptions of truth (scribal sources of truth are the closest my model ever comes), choosing instead to limit my account to different forms of absolutism. As long as my account is not (wrongly) construed as an argument for “all these models of truth are equal” then there is no relativism to be found anywhere within it.
Missing, especially as you bring in Frege, is the distinction between intension and extension or the distinction between sense and reference. With that the importance of interpretation and thus hermeneutics rises. Discussing all this without discussing hermeneutics cripples your case I think.
Comment by Clark — June 10, 2015 @ 12:03 pm
Interesting summary.
A couple questions. The concept of bearing false witness includes matters unrelated to authority (like he stole me grain or she slept with my husband). What is the name for that kind of truth and falsity in this schematic?
Why do the 10 commandments list not bearing false witness but not “follow the prophet” as a commandment?
Comment by Martin James — June 10, 2015 @ 12:58 pm
Any thoughts on how other cultures fit into this scheme?
What is the difference between political authority about truth and this list. Didn’t the political authority always play a role in what counted as truth?
Comment by Martin James — June 10, 2015 @ 1:01 pm
Another point about the classification is that what is listed under prophetic from a historical point of view is almost completely false prophets. All of the later developments you list were responses and reactions to false prophets not LDS prophets so they aren’t necessarily opposed to prophets form an LDS point of view.
Furthermore, what makes LDS prophets different is that the truth of the God they prophesy of includes all truth that is truth including science and logic and any other modalities of truth we discover.
The problems with human reason and worldliness are problems of the apprehension of truth not any lessening of the empirical truths that exist.
You are mainly pitting two types of false prophets against each other.
Comment by Martin James — June 10, 2015 @ 1:49 pm
Jeff G,
In your dreams! Where is your support for this premise that makes such outlandish claims?
In the beginning wasn’t God the source of truth and isn’t he still today? Binding? Beyond question? So there was no war in heaven or debate with Satan or Korihor?
Still shamelessly conflating authority with power and truth! Why? Because today’s church is obviously without the power it once had and that implies missing truth as well so what are they (you) left with? Spinning, bending and conflating the meaning of authority into looking like more than it actually is.
Comment by Howard — June 10, 2015 @ 2:52 pm
Which of the types of truth is being used in preparing the history of absolute truth?
Comment by Martin James — June 10, 2015 @ 6:52 pm
Clark,
“Discussing all this without discussing hermeneutics cripples your case I think.”
I still do not see this. Of course I did not want to bring in all of Frege’s thinking for the sake of brevity, but I only thought this because I still don’t see how it’s all that important. Maybe it’s because I reject almost all of Frege’s thinking regarding sense and reference.
Martin,
“Follow the prophet” is only worth stating once it has been called into question. Thus, the very existence of the 10 commandments given by a prophet presupposes that the people ought to listen to that prophet.
With regards to telling the truth and falsity, you raise a great point. I’m not sure anybody would call this “absolute truth” but I think that version of truth (I’ve previously called it the morality of communication) is MUCH closer to absolute truth than the modern correspondence model of truth. In each of the cases I list, I am basically discussing the changing moral rules surrounding making, questioning and justifying speech acts. I think this dovetails nicely with the examples you bring up.
I don’t have too much to say about other cultures, since I am much more focused on those cultures that still exert influence upon us today. As for political authority, I think the relationship is very complicated. After all the political authority of Moses, Ceasar, the Pope, King James and Pres. Obama are all very different in their relationship with priesthood authorities of the time. Discussing this evolution would require another (several) post(s).
“The problems with human reason and worldliness are problems of the apprehension of truth not any lessening of the empirical truths that exist.”
This is exactly false. The whole point of the post is that human reason and worldiness is not that they merely pollute truth, but actively transform our very conception of what truth is supposed to be. After all, empirical “truth” meant very, very little to anybody until the last 300 years or so. To equate descriptions of the behavior of the physical world with “truth” would have been very close to blasphemy not all that long ago. Truth had always been something much deeper and more important than that. In fact, the truth of such descriptions, take Newton’s first law for example, would have lied not in the law itself but in the meaning, purpose of moral significance of the law – question which science has completely and totally dismissed. From this perspective, Newton’s first law is not truth at all – regardless of its scientific of empirical merits. The enlightenment completely changed the definition of truth and it is this change that I am trying to partially undo.
Comment by Jeff G — June 11, 2015 @ 3:00 pm
Howard,
I will grant some shortcoming of my over-simplified account, but these are almost certainly not the one’s you are most worried about. For starters, most accounts of the rise of political and priestly authority start with rather egalitarian tribes. As groups grow, according to such accounts, it becomes increasingly difficult for participatory democracy and the common will that emerges from it to continue without dangerous fragmentation. This gave way to the rise of the patriarchal authority of “big men”. This eventually transformed into the authority of prophets, priests and kings. Such authority figures most definitely did speak to their group with an authority that trumped anybody else in the group. That is the whole point of the ceremonies of ordination, coronation, etc. It is at this point that both the scriptures and my own account started. (A more detailed account of truth within the context of traditional authority is Pascal Boyer’s “Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse.” I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s a decent start.
What I did not mean to imply is that 1) there is no check on authority figures, or 2) that people were not allowed to question in any sense whatsoever or 3) that there is no over lap between the different models. Rather, I was discussing the moral rules that *ought* to govern a person’s relationship to righteous authority figures. Examples of this can be found through the OT, PoGP, BoM, etc. The example of Isaac’s willing to be sacrificed is especially poignant as is the case of Moses. The case of Korihor and other BoM anti-Christs make great examples of exactly what I mean. What they were saying was unrighteous/false and they ought not to have believed and spoke as they did. That said, the church could not punish such actions and the law refused do and thus left the enforcement of such communications in the hands of God alone. Thus, Korihor is probably the weakest counter-example that you could have brought up.
In fact, my account is even stronger than this. Since my account is basically a brief history of what it meant to use human reason. Thus, prior to the invention of predicate logic, euclidean geometry, propositional logic, textual comparison, etc. what in the world do you think constrained authority figures? Perhaps this partially explains why human reasoning was so derived back then since it was so disciplined? Another line of thought would be that progressives such as yourself tend to measure progress in terms of egalitarianism and the rejection of the authoritarianism of traditional figures. Does this not presuppose that the past was in fact marked by a non-egalitarian authoritarianism that was itself enforced by traditional moralities? You might have moral objections to “prophetic truth” as I have described it, but this is very different from denying that it actually existed and evolved over time.
That said, I might ask what evidence you have for your own outrageous claims? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
Martin again,
My aim has always been to use as much logical truth as I can without violating the boundaries of prophetic truth. Of course, in the same way that logical and scientific truth reject most prophetic truth as nonsense that is neither true nor false, prophetic truth similarly sees scientific and logical truth as more (or less) useful information that is itself neither true nor false. Thus, I would say that my account is logical information (instead of logical truth) that is (hopefully) useful to prophetic truth.
Comment by Jeff G — June 11, 2015 @ 3:27 pm
So Geoff J. had this quote from brother Brigham. “In these respects we differ, from the Christian world, for our religion will not clash with or contradict the facts of science in any particular.” and ““It was observed here just now that we differ from the Christian world in our religious faith and belief; and so we do very materially. I am not astonished that infidelity prevails to a great extent among the inhabitants of the earth, for the religious teachers of the people advance many ideas and notions for truth which are in opposition to and contradict facts demonstrated by science, and which are generally understood.”
The reason that I am so keen to comment on your posts is that I think you are flushing this mormon tradition down the garbage and attempting to make analogies with other traditions. Science is completely and totally on the side of the LDS prophets. Notice how he uses the term “materially”. We are all about the substance.
Your whole way of thinking is just off key to this aspect of mormon prophecy.
Comment by Martin James — June 11, 2015 @ 5:40 pm
“Science is completely and totally on the side of the LDS prophets.”
You’re kidding, right? I could produce at least as many quotes from Brigham where he totally rejects Darwinism and lots of other “so-called” natural philosophers (the word “scientist” hadn’t been invented yet) for their false theories. Seriously, search “natural philosophers” in the journal of discourses.
Furthermore, when was the last time that somebody who actually had priesthood stewardship over you quoted that passage? Yes, there are lots and lots of quotes that are pro-science in Mormonism. But to say that they are both totally and without qualification on each other’s side is an absurd exaggeration.
A much more accurate description would be that Mormonism is not hostile to science as such… and neither am I. Let’s just not pretend that Mormonism grants science the authority to trump revelation when the two clash – Niether Brigham nor any other prophet granted that. In fact, as I’ve said to you before, the idea that truths in the the two cultures do not clash is a premise by which each side criticizes and attacks the falsities in the other. It is NOT a form of open-minded inclusion. Each side is simply saying that they are for the other side, inasmuch as it doesn’t contradict their own side. There is nothing deep or interesting about this.
Comment by Jeff G — June 11, 2015 @ 6:05 pm
Of course, the important interaction is not between what the prophets teach and what the geneticist teaches. Rather it is between what the prophets and the scientists of religion – aka theologians – teach that is at issue. Theologians bring the systematic methods of science to religion and thus corrupt it…. and I think both prophets and scientists have little respect for these theologians, but for different reasons.
Scientists like theologians for their logical and systematic thinking, but object to their supernaturalism. Prophet like the supernaturalism, but reject their logical and systematic thinking.
Comment by Jeff G — June 11, 2015 @ 6:09 pm
What there is nothing deep or interesting about is the so-called battle between science and prophets.
Comment by Martin James — June 11, 2015 @ 9:42 pm
“You’re kidding, right? I could produce at least as many quotes from Brigham where he totally rejects Darwinism and lots of other “so-called” natural philosophers (the word “scientist” hadn’t been invented yet) for their false theories. Seriously, search “natural philosophers” in the journal of discourses.”
In any of those does he argue that Darwinism is wrong because empirical truth isn’t the important kind of truth? Is is a content or a form type of argument? Does he take the stance that he is right because he is the prophet and they are not or is he using reason in some form?
But back to your side of the argument. Let’s say I agree with you that it would be good to return to a prophetic type of truth. How do you sort all the historical figures believed by some people (including themselves) to be a prophet into true and false prophets?
If like SilverRain you want to keep some portion of what they say as truth, then what is it that makes some of what false prophets say true? It can’t be their status of a prophet because we have already agreed they are false prophets. So what is it? By your lights, what makes some of their statements true?
Comment by Martin James — June 12, 2015 @ 5:32 am
“What there is nothing deep or interesting about is the so-called battle between science and prophets.”
Well, considering how I put out several dozens posts arguing that there is something deep and interesting in the tension between them, I think I’m going to need more than a mere assertion to accept this. Consider the most basic tension:
Science says that the priesthood office of a speaker has no bearing whatsoever on the justification of the speech. The Mormon tradition, by contrast, says that the priesthood office of a speaker does have some bearing on the justification of their speech.
This is a contradiction that has played itself out in several ways though out history that I have gone to great lengths to articulate. Perhaps the most obvious one (and the one that you continue to not address) is when science took all of the subject matter that was truth (meaning, purpose, etc.) and put them off to the side saying that they would not address them. They then continued to use the word “truth” to address issues that from a religious perspective had no relation to that word at all.
The most famous movement behind this transformation of the meaning of the word “truth” was carried out by the French Philosophes who were the primary popularizers of enlightenment thinking and led directly to the French Revolution wherein intellectual actively and explicitly fought to replace the Catholic Church with a religion of reason. It was movements like these that tricked the christian world into thinking that science was after truth in more or less the same sense as religion had always been – when this was most definitely not the case.
This substitution of one meaning for another was by no means an accident or incidental, for without the idea that science and religion were after the same truth in some sense, then science could never have been used to constrain and subvert religion…. and this was the entire point of the enlightenment and revolution.
” Does he take the stance that he is right because he is the prophet and they are not or is he using reason in some form?”
Oh, he absolutely rejects those theories because they are incompatible with revelation. Indeed, Brigham knew very, very little about Darwinism, but what he did know was that it’s account of struggle and selection undermined his attempts at establishing the united order. That was his entire argument! At no point does he address empirical data or find it of any particular interest or import.
Of course, what you seem to be asking is whether Brigham made the same claims and arguments I am making. Of course he didn’t, nor would I ever expect him to. Mine account does NOT take prophetic statements as premises from which to argue. Instead, I am merely attempting to gain a critical distance from both prophets and science in order to appreciate the contradictions and tension between the two. I see no reason why Brigham would have attempted any thing like what I am doing.
“How do you sort all the historical figures believed by some people (including themselves) to be a prophet into true and false prophets?”
There is only one way we have ever been taught to do this – James 1:5. Any other method is wrong and will end up in the quagmire than JS found himself in before the 1st vision.
“what is it that makes some of what false prophets say true?”
Again, I’ve answered this a few times already. For starters, not all information and statement are true or false in a religious sense. Secondly, statements are made true by the prophetic endorsement of those who actually in the here and now have stewardship over us. A dead person having been a true prophet to people who lived and died long ago doesn’t have much relevance to us.
If you couldn’t anticipate my response by now, then I think we’re wasting our time.
Comment by Jeff G — June 12, 2015 @ 4:19 pm
“The most famous movement behind this transformation of the meaning of the word “truth” was carried out by the French Philosophes who were the primary popularizers of enlightenment thinking and led directly to the French Revolution wherein intellectual actively and explicitly fought to replace the Catholic Church with a religion of reason.”
Well, we are certainly wasting our time if we can’t agree that this was a good thing because the Catholic Church was made up of false prophets in a religious sense and so replacing them them with anything is an improvement. The perplexing thing to me is that you correlate authority for false prophets with authority with true prophets when they have nothing in common so all of the historical transition is completely irrelevant or worse, misleading.
Furthermore, it is the analogical reasoning that you are doing that relates the two that is causing you to misunderstand what the priesthood really is.
Comment by Martin James — June 13, 2015 @ 1:47 pm
Again, I have addressed this already.
The revolutions and reformations were revolts against traditional authorities as such, seeing all of it as illegitimate. It is not I, but the modern scientists and philosophers that conflate Catholic and Mormon authority. So if you find that conflation as objectionable as you claim, then you should side with me in distancing yourself from modern science and philosophy. But let’s be honest, you don’t really care about that conflation do you?
Comment by Jeff G — June 13, 2015 @ 3:07 pm
Just to expand a bit:
Niether I, Catholics nor Mormons conflate their authority with that of the others. What they do agree upon, however, is that one’s ordination matters… a lot!
What modern reason says, by contrast, is that one’s ordination does not matter at all, regardless of whether you’re Mormon, Catholic, etc. Thus, modern reason conflates all claims to authority together and dismisses them all as one big undifferentiated irrelevance.
If you’re really uncomfortable with conflating different traditional authorities like that, then you should agree with me. But this is the exact opposite of what you have done. For this reason I find your objections incoherent.
Comment by Jeff G — June 13, 2015 @ 3:44 pm
Let’s recap where we agree (I think).
1. Religious authority is not democratic and is constraining.
2. The process of determining authority is based on personal revelation as described in James.
Basically, I’m not concerned with your critique of people wanting to use science to challenge religious authority.
My concern is not with your attack on scientists it is with your critique of things empirical (or sensory or experiential.)
So, let’s say I grant you the word “truth” and that I agree to say that what scientists do is not important as “truth”.
What I want to keep is what I will call “measurement”. I hold that consistency of measurement and words is a sign of true authority. It is one of the fruits by which you will know them.
It’s not about a power struggle for me. It’s about the web of connections of our experience.
You want to have what I will call a “naive”(from a mathematical point of view) understanding of the processes of communicating and living and being in the world and think you can separate the way you understand religion and authority from the “empirics” of the world. You don’t think there is anything that interesting in question like what it means religiously for someone to be mentally impaired (say Down’s syndrome or dementia or under the influence of a mind-altering substance) all of these details are trivia to you. They are just not that important. We can agree to disagree on that one.
But it goes further in that I think it is not easy to separate what it means for us to follow the prophets and other religious authority from the process by which we understand reason and language.
Even if we are agreed that it is living prophets that matter, since the living prophets repeatedly counsel us to read the scriptures and quote the words of past prophets, both their words and the way we understand those words matters.
Again, I can agree with you that our ordinary way of understanding things is sufficient for you. But I don’t agree that all of this historical and philosophical treatment of the enlightenment battle is at all convincing in terms of how we should understand religious authority. For how we apply the principles that are taught. In a way, you don’t really even have a theory of what a “principle” is. What kind of reason is involved in applying a principle? What process we would use to understand if we are being unprincipled? You rule out measurement as a particularly useful method of remaining principled.
You think I’m using science or reason against religious authority but I don’t recall relying on any science or philosophers in my arguments. All I have done is to show examples of the words of religious authorities and ask how they can be understood in the light of your words. I don’t think they describe the same process of being religious that you do.
This is not siding with science in a struggle over authority. It is questioning if your words are consonant with religious authority and an LDS worldview.
I think your point is that since we have separate stewardship that is fine because my reasoning doesn’t apply to you. But my understanding of my religious duty is to love my neighbor and my understanding of love includes persuasion of others that accurate measurement is a gift of God.
Have a nice day, brother Jeff.
Comment by Martin James — June 14, 2015 @ 8:24 am
That was actually a pretty helpful comment.
“What I want to keep is what I will call “measurement”. I hold that consistency of measurement and words is a sign of true authority.”
I do not, however, have much any idea of what that is supposed to mean. Measurement, after all, presupposes some external and thus publicly available standard against which things are to be measured across space and/or time. (Wittgenstein’s beetle in a box is what I have in mind here.) I thus see this as a pretty inappropriate box in which to place personal revelation.
I’m also suspicious on your insistence that true authority must in some sense be non-human. I see this as a fully modern ideology that has no place within the scriptures. In other words, it goes back the the Greek rather than the Hebrew side of the Euthyphro dilemma.
“It’s not about a power struggle for me.”
This is probably why you’re systematically misinterpreting me since I have been assuming (and arguing) that power is ALWAYS an issue. Foucault made a pretty compelling case (especially to a pragmatist like me) that inasmuch as truth and knowledge are things that pass between people, power is inescapably an issue although we might try to disguise this fact in various ways.
“I think it is not easy to separate what it means for us to follow the prophets and other religious authority from the process by which we understand reason and language.”
You keep saying this, but I still haven’t a clue what you mean by it. I know it’s pretty time consuming to do, but I think I need to you to break down the structure of your issue in order to isolate the contradiction that you think is at play, because I simply do not see it. I am very open to the ways in which we negotiate (if that’s even the right word for it) meanings between each other being in contradiction with the ways that I think truth is established within the gospel. My intuitions simply aren’t all that clear on the subject, but I’d be very open to you (or Clark) helping me out here.
“You think I’m using science or reason against religious authority but I don’t recall relying on any science or philosophers in my arguments.”
Relying upon measurements is a very scientific position that was invented and popularized by philosophers. Just because you don’t quote or are not aware of them does not mean they aren’t there all the same.
Comment by Jeff G — June 16, 2015 @ 4:03 pm