Letter Two: Can Anybody Know What’s True?

Letters to an Honest Skeptic

Dear friend,

In my last letter, I laid out the evidence that God exists, and I made you a claim: believing it does not require intellectual suicide. Perhaps you weighed the evidence. Perhaps you are still weighing it. Either way, there is an objection I need to address before we go any further, because it is designed to make weighing evidence impossible in the first place.

The objection goes like this: “That is your truth. I have mine. Nobody can really say what is true, so why are we even talking?”

You have heard it. You may have said it. Before I answer it, I want to tell you about the most famous time this question was ever asked, because you may not know the story.

The governor’s question

About two thousand years ago, a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate sat in judgment over a Galilean carpenter named Jesus. The charge was claiming to be a king. In the middle of the interrogation, the prisoner said something no prisoner has ever said to a judge, before or since: “For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth.”

Pilate answered with the question people are still asking today: “What is truth?”

Notice what the record says he did next. He asked the question, turned around, and walked out of the room. He did not wait for an answer.

Therefore, his question was not really a question. It was an exit. It was a way to end a conversation that was moving toward something he did not want to face. In thirty years of ministry I have found that “who’s to say what’s true?” usually functions the same way today. It is rarely a conclusion that someone reasoned their way into. It is a door people leave through.

I would rather you stayed in the room. Therefore, let us actually answer the governor.

What truth is

Truth is when what is said matches what is. That is the entire definition. If I tell you my truck is out of fuel and the tank is dry, I told you the truth. If the tank is full, I told you a falsehood, regardless of how sincerely I believed it.

Now, there are two kinds of statements in this world, and much of the confusion between you and your religious friends comes from failing to distinguish them.

Some statements are preferences. “Chocolate is the best ice cream” is a statement about me, not about ice cream. It cannot be true or false in any meaningful sense, and arguing about it is pointless.

Other statements are claims of fact, and some claims of fact carry life-and-death weight. Consider the label on a medicine bottle. That label is not a preference. It matches the contents or it does not, and if the pharmacist filled it wrong, sincerity will not save the patient. A mislabeled bottle can kill a man who trusted it completely.

Here is my claim, and I will defend it through every letter that follows: Christianity has never made preference claims. It makes claims of fact, and they carry life-and-death weight. God exists, or He does not. Jesus rose from the dead, or He did not. These are statements about what is, true for everybody or false for everybody. My feelings do not make them true, and your doubts do not make them false. Therefore, the honest response, for both of us, is not to compare feelings. It is to check the label against the contents.

The statement that refutes itself

Now test the relativist’s creed by its own rules.

“There is no absolute truth.” Is that statement absolutely true?

“Nobody can really know anything.” Do you know that?

“Everyone has their own truth.” Is that true for everyone?

Each version of the claim fails its own test. To announce that there is no truth is to make a truth claim. The statement refutes itself the moment it is spoken. Two Christian writers, Frank Beckwith and Greg Koukl, titled their book on relativism accurately: it leaves a man with his feet firmly planted in mid-air.

There is also a practical test. Nobody lives as though truth is relative. The same person who says so still expects the bank to apply objective arithmetic to his account, still expects the engineer who built the bridge to have treated load limits as fact, and still cries “that’s not fair” the moment he is wronged. Fair by what standard? A man reveals what he believes about truth by how he responds to being lied to.

If none of that describes you

Perhaps you read all of that and concluded, “That is not me.” Perhaps you are no relativist at all. Perhaps you are more certain than most churchgoers that some things are really, truly evil, cruelty, oppression, abuse of the powerless, and your complaint against Christianity is not that it claims truth, but that you believe it is on the wrong side of it. You may even believe some ideas are dangerous and should not be given a hearing.

If that is you, then let me begin with something you may not expect from a pastor: I believe you are right about the most important thing. Moral absolutes exist. Real evil is real. I will not spend one sentence trying to argue you out of that certainty. But notice what your certainty means. You have already abandoned “who’s to say?” Even calling an idea dangerous is a claim about what actually is. Therefore, you and I are both making claims of fact now, and we can have a serious conversation.

One more thing, and I intend this carefully. If part of your certainty comes from experience, something that happened to you, perhaps at the hands of religious people, then hear me: what happened to you is real. I will go further. It is absolutely true. It happened, and nobody, least of all me, has any business telling you it did not. But there is a distinction here that matters, and it binds my experiences as much as yours. What happened is a fact. What it proves is an interpretation. “Church people hurt me” can be absolutely true, while “therefore Christianity is false” is a separate claim that must be examined on its own evidence. Experience is evidence. It is not automatically the verdict.

Therefore, the question I would put to you is not whether evil is real. We agree that it is. The question is what your certainty is standing on.

The rulebook problem

I will make that question concrete with a true account about sheep.

A man once imported a flock of hair sheep with the goal of building the hardiest flock in America, and his method was nature’s own method. He exposed them to disease, to intestinal worms, and to the pests that kill sheep, and he let nature sort them. The weak died. Only the toughest survivors were ever bred. It worked. Their descendants are among the hardiest sheep in this country today. The method was effective. It was not compassionate.

I raise this because thoughtful skeptics often tell me that morality does not need God, that evolution explains it, that kindness is simply “good for the community.” But examine honestly what nature’s version of “good for the community” is. It is that sheep pen. Eliminate the weak, favor the strong bloodlines, and let the sick die. Survival of the fittest, applied consistently, produces hardy sheep. It does not produce hospitals, food pantries, or a man sitting up all night with a dying stranger. Yet those are precisely the things you and I both call good, and they are precisely the behaviors nature’s program would eliminate.

I am not questioning your goodness. I have known skeptics whose kindness would shame half the church. I am asking a harder question: where does your standard come from? When you call compassion good and cruelty evil, really good and really evil, you are appealing to a rulebook that nature never wrote. My Book offers an explanation for why you cannot stop appealing to it: the Law is “written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness.” The rulebook is in your chest whether or not you have ever acknowledged its Author. That is my explanation. If you have a better one, I would honestly like to hear it, but “it evolved” must explain why your morality keeps overruling evolution.

One question

Here is where I will leave you this time.

The next time you find yourself thinking “well, that is true for them,” stop and ask: is this a preference, or a claim of fact? Because if the God question is a preference question, then you may close this book with a clear conscience, and I will not blame you. But if it is a claim of fact, and it is, it is the label on the most important bottle you will ever be handed, then it deserves what every such claim deserves. Check the label against the contents.

Pilate asked the right question. His error was leaving the room before the Answer spoke. Stay in the room with me a few more letters.

In the next letter, we examine the label itself: why would anybody trust an ancient book?

Your friend, Mark

Letters to an Honest Skeptic is written alongside a study our church walked through together. You’re welcome any Sunday, questions and all. Walshville Christian Church, Walshville, Illinois.