The Nature of Truth

Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who later converted to Catholicism, and became a Discalced Carmelite Nun. She died in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 and was canonised by the Church as a saint and martyr, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

She once wrote, "But this is the essence of all human philosophising: truth is only one, but it is divided for us into truths that we must conquer step by step."

Truth (somewhat ironically) is a slippery word, with various shades of meaning. As the playwright Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest, "the truth is rarely pure and never simple." I Googled it, and came up with these three definitions:

    1 the quality of being true.

    2 that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality

    3 a fact or belief that is accepted as true.

So there is legal truth ("I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."); scientific truth (proved by objective evidence);  and spiritual or mythical truth (a fact or belief that is accepted as true).

Even the first two, legal truth and scientific truth, may not be such immoveable feasts as they seem at first sight. For the first is dependent on the memory and subjective thinking and beliefs of the person telling it and the second is only true so long as further evidence is not revealed, which turns that particular scientific truth upside down.

The one I'm most interested in, as a writer and a minister, is the third. Because I believe that most human beings live out their lives in accordance with what they believe to be the highest truth known to them. It also means the stories we tell ourselves in an attempt to make sense of our world. Which may not be "true" in the strictest legal or scientific sense. And yet, it defines their lives - how they act, whom they associate with, and on and on.

So I think I'd qualify my definition of truth with the caveat "so far as I know at this moment in time." I cannot simply accept a once-proved fact as immutable, as many religious believers do. Which is why I am a Unitarian. We are open to discovering new truths, which may (indeed, should) influence our beliefs and behaviour. Which is why there is a Unitarian Universalist 'bumper sticker', which says, "Come to us if you want your answers questioned."

Our whole lives are a quest for truth, which we must uncover / discover step by step, as Edith Stein advised. And it can be incredibly difficult to let go of truths we have held onto since childhood, even when the evidence that they are false is clear. All we can do is our best.

Gardens of the Mind

I love the idea that our minds are like gardens, and that it is up to us to cultivate "thoughts, ideas and visions of great beauty" as the anonymous author of Thought for Today put it on 6th February. We need to tend them carefully. I also believe that our wider communities (whether of family, work colleagues, friends or congregations) can be seen as gardens in need of tender care. Like this beautiful walled garden at Delapre Abbey in Northampton...

The metaphors of gardening and the cycle of the seasons are useful ones in relation to the spiritual journey of our lives. In his meditation, Spring won't take 'No' for an answer, Unitarian Universalist minister Richard S. Gilbert speaks of "the changing seasons of the self." The self's seasons change not only as we grow older, but also within shorter periods of time - sometimes even in the same day, as we move through our daily lives. Last weekend, for example, I received two pieces of bad news, which were then (at least partially) eclipses by an amazing piece of good news, so that my thoughts ricocheted from worry and sadness to great joy, in the space of a few hours.

Which reminded me that my mind and my emotions are quite separate entities. It was my emotions which were all over the place, and I had to bring my mind to bear on the rapidly evolving situation, to regain some stability and balance. As the Thought for Today author put it, "Thoughts have great power, they are like seeds you plant in your mind. The more you hold onto a particular thought, the more power you invest in it. Positive thoughts give us energy and strength. Negative thoughts rob us of power and make us feel tired and strained."

It is not only the gardens of our individual minds which need careful tending, but also the gardens of our faith and other communities. We have to be really careful about the plants we allow to take root and grow there, tending the positive ones with care, and uprooting the negative ones, before they take deep root and strangle our efforts to grow and thrive.

And yet, to extend the metaphor even further, we are not responsible for each other's gardens, each other's minds. Yes, we each have some responsibility for our communal gardens, but we also need to recognise that all of us have plants to contribute. In her piece Gardening is Necessary, which appeared in the first volume of With Heart and Mind, Unitarian Betty Rathbone wrote, "We should see that we have our own patch in order, rather than trying to impose our ideas on other people and their affairs." And (perhaps more importantly) "We should expect to live with change and see the whole cycle of life from tender beginnings to growth and decay as valuable, not expect to be able to stay all the time with the bits that we enjoy most. We need to realise where we are in our life cycle and continually revise our ideas of our place in the world."

The opposite of growth (whether spiritual, communal or horticultural) is stagnation. This happens when we are reluctant to embrace change, harking back to the (almost mythical) "good old days" of the distant past. Which can make us want to recreate it, however impossible that might be. And yes, I get it. Change can be frightening. But I believe we are doing ourselves a great disservice if we close our minds to change, strangling the new shoots which will keep cropping up, however often we try to weed them out.

I believe it is worth embracing change and growth for ourselves and for those we care about. So let us tend the gardens of our minds and our communities with assiduous care, choosing only the best seeds, which will grow into the most glorious flowers. Because each one of us has something positive to contribute to our future communities, our future selves.

Setting Our Priorities

The 20th century philosopher and author, Albert Camus, once wrote something like, "The greatest saving that can be made in the world of thinking is to accept the incomprehensibility of the world and to take care of people."

Which sounds like a tempting philosophy on one level. In that I agree it is better to spend our time taking care of the people in our world, rather than navel-gazing in a fruitless attempt to understand the incomprehensible.

Yet on another level, don't we have a duty of care to the wider world too? Shouldn't we be doing what we can to try to understand how we might save the planet from climate change, save the innumerable species of animals, insects, plants and other living beings from imminent extinction? It is not just people who matter. And, don't we also have a duty to try to understand how the world works (or perhaps, more accurately fails to work, at least on a human level), in the context of the great interdependence of all life? It's a trickier question than it first sounds.

Because if we don't bother trying to understand how our actions as part of the world impact that same world, how can we minimise our negative impacts and maximise our positive ones? Then, once we do begin to understand that, to put it into practice.

Which is why I recently bought The Climate Book*, a 400+ page large format hardback, in which climate justic activist Greta Thunberg, has brought together all the latest thinking about the climate crisis into one place. In her introduction, she writes, "In 2021, I invited a great number of leading scientists and experts, and activists, authors and storytellers to contribute... This book... covers everything from melting ice shelves to economics, from fast fashion to the loss of species, from pandemics to vanishing islands, from deforestation to the loss of fertile soils, from water shortages to Indigenous sovereignty, from future food production to carbon budgets - and it lays bare the actions of those responsible and the failures of those who should have already shared this information with the citizens of the world."

It is an incredibly well-written but sobering read. I am working my way through it with increasing horror for the mess we are making of our blue-green planet. It is daunting, and tempting to wonder how the actions of any one individual could make a positive difference in the face of the complex problems facing the planet. But that is copping out. At the very end, she includes four short sections, with the following titles:

• What needs to be done
• What we can do together as a society
• What you can do as an individual
• Some of us can do more than others (including politicians, media and TV producers, journalist, and celebrities and influencers)

So yes, I agree with Camus that we need to care for people. But we also need to understand how the actions of people impact the wider world, so that we can do our best to save it, and encourage others to do the same. Because, it is nearly too late...

*The Climate Book created by Greta Thunberg. Allen Lane, 2022.

Nothing Occurs at Random

This week I have come across a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher named Leucippus. According to Wikipedia, he "is credited with developing the philosophical school of atomism. He proposed that all things are made up of microscopic, indivisible particles that interact and combine to produce all the things of the world." He developed this theory with his student Democritus, in the 5th century BCE.

But the Wikipedia article is careful to point out that there are great differences between Leucippus's 'atomism' and modern atomic theory: "Instead of the purely material atoms of Leucippus, modern atomic theory shows that fundamental forces combine subatomic particles into atoms and link atoms together into molecules."

In his work, On Mind, he wrote, "Nothing occurs at random, but everything from reason and by necessity." Yet at the same time, he rejected the idea that there was an intelligent force (or deity) controlling the universe.

I'm not sure I agree with him. "Nothing occurs at random, but everything from reason and by necessity." In which case, where does free will fit in? If everything occurs "by necessity", then what difference can we, as human beings, make to the world? 

I would rather believe that, although there are many forces at play in how events in our world come to pass, nevertheless, the actions of individual human beings can make a difference. There is a theory that a small stone, placed in exactly the right place in a river, can change the course of that river. In human terms, the actions or words of a single person, done or said at exactly the right time, can change the beliefs of a whole society, its awareness of a particular situation that people have (up until that point) accepted unthinkingly. For example, Rosa Parks sitting down on a bus, and refusing to get up because a white person wanted her seat, is an example of one small action ultimately making a huge difference.

So I believe that it is possible to make a positive difference, by our actions and words. That nothing is inevitable, although I completely understand why things may seem to be so. It takes a lot of courage to go against the accepted flow of one's society, to stand up for the possibility of a new and better way of doing things, a new and better way of human interaction.

I suppose that the second part of Leucippus's quote may cover this: that "everything [occurs] from reason"... so it is when a person (or people) use their innate reasoning powers and come up with new understandings of the world, that change becomes possible.

Or, just possibly, it is when a person listens to the "still small voice" of their conscience, or of God inside them (depending on your beliefs) that they become able to grow and change and interact with the world around them in a more positive way.

To conclude, while we may believe that nothing occurs at random, there are very many forces at work in the world, which influence the things which do occur, including human free will, reason, and conscience.