Why truth matters

And one last good reason for thinking that truth matters, it seems to us, is all about preferences, in the largest and most humanly important sense. It’s about happiness, flourishing, enthusiasm, about what makes life worth living, why we prefer being awake to being asleep, why it’s a privilege to be human. It’s about why truth matters. Really matters. Not in a dull perfunctory dutiful sense, but in a real, lived, felt sense - ‘on the pulses’, as Keats put it.

This is the kind of mattering we’re talking about here - personal but also public, subjective but also communicable and sharable, immediate but also permanent, cognitive but also emotional. In a way it’s just as much about community and solidarity as Rorty’s vision is, but it’s a community that thinks truth matters rather than one that prefers solidarity to truth. Truth is perhaps the capital city on that mattering map.

This reason is based on the thought that enquiry, curiosity, interest, investigation, explanation-seeking, are hugely important components of human happiness. This doesn’t seem to be a terribly popular thought right now. Public rhetoric tends to aim much lower, for some reason. It seems to see us all as hunkered down, and settling. Settling for minimal, parochial, almost biological satisfactions - family, safety, money. But that underestimates us. We want more than more. We want to ask questions, we want to learn, we want to understand. That’s a very human taste and pleasure. Again, as we said in Chapter 1, it seems a waste not to use human capacities and abilities. Anyone can settle for just survival and reproduction and comfort, but we can do more. That’s a privilege - and it seems a kind of sacrilege not to use it.

And real enquiry presupposes that truth matters. That it is true that there is a truth of the matter we’re investigating, even if it turns out that we can’t find it. Maybe the next generation can, or two or three or ten after that, or maybe just someone more skilled than we are. But we have to think there is something to find in order for enquiry to be genuine enquiry and not just an arbitrary game that doesn’t go anywhere. We like games, but we also like genuine enquiry. That’s why truth matters.

Postmodern (and postmodern-aided tradition) attacks on science and truth of the sort quoted above tend to frame science and enquiry as impoverished in various ways: arid, cold, unfeeling, mechanical, dull, empty of poetry and colour and life, devoid of wonder. This is an old Romantic trope - Blake’s ’single vision and Newton’s sleep’, Keat’s ‘cold philosophy would clip an angel’s wings’, Wordsworth’s ‘they murder to dissect’. But scientists with real experience of enquiry and discovery think that Blake, Keats and Wordsworth were simply wrong, and that so are their contemporary avatars. Richard Dawkins for example:

To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposed to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected … The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.

And Matt Ridley:

The one thing I would try to teach the world about science is that science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it.

The myth, started by the Romantic poets, that science gets rid of mysteries was well nailed by Albert Einstein - whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets. Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D. Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world’s stock of awe.

That’s why truth matters.

Billy Graham

I love reading. I think what a person reads has a lot to say about that person as well. I was at someone’s else, and spotted this biography of Billy Graham. What a famed and celebrated figure of Christianity. All the same, he’s naught but a salesman who cannot make a living out of anything else but cashing in on people’s insecurities and ignorance to me.

A Personal Word From A Farewell to God

CHARLES TEMPLETON

Christopher Hitchens: The road to Damascus was not and is not a one-way street. For many years, Charles Templeton (1915-2001) was the second string to the boring racist charlatan Billy Graham: addressing massive crowds in sports statidums and allegedly bringing thousands of the credulous to Christ, there came a time when he found he could not participate in the racket any longer. His de-conversion is a testament from an honest if simple man, and also contains a close-up of the mediocre demagogue who has served as spiritual counselor to successive American presidents.

Early that summer, I flew to Montreat, North Carolina, to spend a day with Billy and Ruth Graham. Billy and I had become close friends, although our backgrounds were radically different. Billy was a country boy, raised in a deeply religious household on a farm in the American South. He had graduated from Bob Jones College in Tennessee and Wheaton College in Illinois - both Christian fundamentalist schools - and had a B.A. in anthropology.

We talked long and earnestly about my decision. Both of us sensed that, for all our avowed intentions to maintain our friendship, our feet were now set on divergent paths.

Later that summer, just before I enrolled at Princeton, we met again in New York City. On this occasion we spent the better part of two days closeted in a room in the Taft Hotel. All our differences came to a head in a discussion, which better than anything I know explains Billy Graham and his phenomenal success as an evangelist.

In the course of our conversation I said, “But, Billy, it’s simply not possible any longer to believe, for instance, the biblical account of creation. The world wasn’t created over a period of days a few thousand years ago; it has evolved over millions of years. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s a demonstrable fact.”

“I don’t accept that,” Billy said. “And there are reputable scholars who don’t.” [What a counter-argument.]

“Who are these scholars?” I said. “Men in conservative Christian colleges?”

“Most of them, yes,” he said. “But that’s not the point. I believe the Genesis account of creation because it’s in the Bible. I’ve discovered something in my ministry: when I take the Bible literally, when I proclaim it as the Word of God, my preaching has power. When I stand on the platform and say, ‘God says,’ or ‘the Bible says,’ the Holy Spirit uses me. There are results. Wiser men than you and I have been arguing questions like this for centuries. I don’t have the time or the intellect to examine all sides of each theological dispute, so I’ve decided, once and for all, to stop questioning and accept the Bible as God’s word.”

“But, Billy,” I protested, “you can’t do that. You don’t dare stop thinking about the most important question in life. Do it and you begin to die. It’s intellectual suicide.”

“I don’t know about anybody else,” he said, “but I’ve decided that that’s the path for me.”

We talked about my going to Princeton and I pressed him to go with me. “Bill,” I said, “face it. We’ve been succesful in large part because of our abilities on the platform. Part of that stems from our energy, our convictions, our youth. But we won’t always be young. We need to grow, to develop some intellectual sinew. Come with me to Princeton.”

“I can’t go to a university here in the States,” he said. “I’m a president of a Bible college, for goodness’ sake!” He was - Northwestern Bible College, a fundamentalist school in Minneapolis.

“Resign,” I said. “That’s not what you’re best fitted for; you’re an evangelist. Come with me to Princeton.”

There was an extended silence. Then, suddenly, he got up and came toward me. “Chuck,” he said, “I can’t go to a college here in the States. But I can and will do this: if we can get accepted by a university outside the country, maybe in England - Oxford, for instance - I’ll go with you.”

He stood in front of me, his hand outstretched. I know Billy well enough to know that, had I taken his hand, he would have kept his word. But I couldn’t do it. I had resigned my church. I had been accepted at Princeton. The fall term was only weeks away. It was too late.

…

Not many months later, Billy travelled to Los Angeles to begin the campaign that would catapult him overnight to international prominence/ I have sometimes wondered what would have happened had I taken his hand that day. I am certain of this: he would not be the Billy Graham he has become, and the history of mass-evangelism would be quite different.

As was inevitable, Billy and I drifted apart. We often talked on the telephone and got together on occasion but, with the years, the occasions became fewer. One afternoon in the early 1970s he telephoned to say he was in Toronto and suggested that he have dinner at my home. He wanted to meet my wife and children to spend a long evening talking.

The evening ended earlier than planned; we simply ran out of subjects of mutual interest. As I drove him to his hotel in downtown Toronto, the conversation became desultory. On the drive home I felt a profound sense of sorrow. Marshall Frady in his book, Billy Graham, quotes Billy as saying to him:

I love Chuck to this very day. He’s one of the few men I have ever loved in my life. He and I had been so close. But then, all of a sudden, our paths were parting. He began to be a little cool to me then. I think…” He pauses and then offers with a faint little smile, “I think that Chuck felt sorry for me.”

It will sound unforgivably condescending, but I do. He has given up the life of unrestricted thought. I occasionally watch Billy in his televised campaigns. Forty years after out working together he is saying the same things, using the same phrases, following the same pattern. When he gives the invitation to come forward, the sequence, even the words, are the same. I turn off the set and am sometimes overtaken by sadness.

I think Billy is what he has to be. I disagree with him at almost every point in his views on God and Christianity and think that much of what he says in the pulpit is puerile, archaic nonsense. But there is no feigning in Billy Graham: he believes what he believes with an invincible innocence. He is the only mass-evangelist I would trust.

And I miss him.

I remember my arguments with a close friend over God as well. The simple fact here is that no one finds the biblical account that truthful anymore. But why do most people still hang on to it? Because they derive comfort and solace in so doing. But you can’t do that. You can’t stop asking the most important question in life. Because if we really only have ONE LIFE to live, we better do something about this knowledge.

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