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The Relationship Between Truth and Reality
Collapse of Western Civilization
Many people are asking whether the West or the Western world, once mostly called Western civilization, is on the verge of collapse. I believe people stopped using “Western civilization,” because they question the civilization now of the West. Maybe the West isn’t civilized any more. But why? What happened to the West? It relates to God and the Bible for sure, but in a more rudimentary form, truth and reality.
For many decades the leading intelligentsia of the West called Western civilization bad, because of its origins, they would say, in colonialism, racism, exploitation, and having white skin. They treat these ironically as even the sins of the West. This necessitated a kind of repentance and transformation, led by the elites of the West into something vastly different than what it once was.
The changes in the West from what it once was, from its foundational and fundamental values, resulted now in an inability to defend itself. It has no basis for its own existence, giving a good argument for those who wish to destroy it. The military defenses of the West also withered away because it spent its money on globalism, welfare programs, egalitarianism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. They sucked up revenues like quick sand.
Inclusion or Exclusion
Someone recently said that the West embraced John Lennon’s song like an anthem, that there is nothing to live or to die for, the world that they imagine. They prefer the world of their imagination, rather than the real world, the actual one in which we and they live.
The attack on nationalism combats exclusion. Nations by nature exclude, not include. This is the cause of division that gives people something to live or to die for. An irony of it is of course that it caused the rise of various groups that receive their identity from victimization. They are oppressed in many various ways by a sundry of oppressors. What proceeded is instead a fight for power all of the time.
Objective Truth or Feelings and Opinions
Powerful intellectual elites of the West started telling us decades ago, and this has only become worse, that there is no objective truth. To get there, they had to eliminate God, the supernatural origin of heaven and earth, a first cause. The belief in God was unsophisticated and again of course resulted in exclusion. The truly sophisticated said, there is only opinion. Everything is relative or only opinion. What I feel is what is.
Feeling in the new and deteriorating West trumps all facts. This is to say that the subjective is superior to the objective. If no objective truth, then also no lie, so you can’t know the difference between truth and lies. You can’t know, so you also then become very gullible to lies. Not knowing the difference between truth and lies means you also have no reason. Everything becomes irrational. A hyper-rational society, an intellectual one, becomes irrational, which is a paradox.
Reality and Truth
What really happens, happened, and will happen is reality. That is also truth. Denying reality is also denying the truth. I like to refer to the reality of the world represented in the hymn, This Is My Father’s World. The world really is the Father’s and He also wrote the Bible. The Bible, which is the truth, matches with reality. Scripture is a guide to reality.
Reality is the state of things as they actually exist. It refers to the actual state of affairs, facts, or conditions that are present in the world, independent of our perceptions or beliefs about them. A statement or belief that is true will however correspond to a fact in reality. When we deal with the truth, we are also dealing with reality. The two do not separate from one another.
Today truth and reality seem, and I say “seem,” not to correlate with one another. They diverge in this world in which we live. In that sense and in others, we live in a post-truth world. That should not surprise someone, when he reads the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:4, when he calls Satan, “the god of this world.” Jesus had said in John 8:44 that Satan is the father of lies. What Satan says does not correspond to reality. He lies about reality. For instance, he told Eve, “Ye shall not surely die.”
Both heaven and earth, everything there is, operate on absolute truth. You can test if it is true, like defying the law of gravity, and find out. Whether you believe it or not, it still holds true. It’s as simple as falling from a cliff and then hitting the ground.
Truth and Power
The chief enemies of the truth today lead a pervasive population that holds to, promotes, and even enforces the unreal and false. Sometimes they defend their cause by saying that truth, which is reality, is a mere construct of power. With truth as a construct, they reconstruct a different reality and call it their truth.
Today the most consequential governing authority, the education system between kindergarten and postgraduate in the United States. won’t allow the teaching or propagation of the truth or reality. That’s not the primary interest any more if not any interest. Many other authoritative and influential institutions or entities cooperate with the bias against the truth and reality, including the legal system (courts) and the mainstream media. One entire political party is against truth or reality, the Democrat Party.
Effect on Churches
Churches succumb to this death of truth and reality. They do it mainly by questioning their own authority. The churches and their leaders undermine scripture and its interpretation, and call it humility or a basis for unity. In part this is a fear of power.
Without truth, everything becomes about who has power. Truth is not objective, so one must have power to assert his own opinions. Nothing is truth, it is only the construction of power. This goes back to the victim and oppressor narrative. Empowerment is the ability or freedom to assert ones self.
The premier institution of truth, the church, literally the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15), acceded to power over fear. Churches don’t want to victimize anyone with the truth, or even just most truths, so they acquiesce to lies, which, yes, distort reality. People do not know the truth about the world God created, because of churches that fear man more than they do God.
Power Comes from Somewhere
When you turn on your lights or your appliance and open your refrigerator and see it working, you know that power comes from somewhere. It didn’t just happen. Your heart is beating, the power for that comes from somewhere. You look up and see a burning sun. The power for that sun comes from somewhere. Nuclear, gravitational, and chemical energy all come from someplace. They have their start somewhere.
We all need power. Our body is burning energy, our brains are using it, our heart needs it, and every other creature does too. It’s there. People are but dust. Power holds this dust together in a complex and functioning form.
The Big Bang Theory supposedly explains the origin of matter, but the explosion could not have occurred without energy. Senior writer and editor of Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover, wrote on June 6, 2019:
The Big Bang theory . . . . pioneered 50 years before Hawking’s lecture by the Belgian physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, who later served as president of the Vatican’s academy of sciences — rewinds the expansion of the universe back to a hot, dense bundle of energy. But where did the initial energy come from?
The Big Bang theory had other problems. Physicists understood that an expanding bundle of energy would grow into a crumpled mess rather than the huge, smooth cosmos that modern astronomers observe.
Men guess, but they don’t have an answer to the origin of energy or power.
The English word “power” is found 272 times in the King James Version. The first time the English word appears, it is koah, and it refers to God’s strength, ability, might, and force. That Hebrew word is used 126 times. The first is used of God in Exodus 15:6, “Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.” Another one is Exodus 32:11, “And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?” A lot of the usages of koah are like that one.
Another Hebrew word translated power in 1 Chronicles 29:11 is gebera, the verse reading: “Thine, O LORD, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all.” That word is used 61 times in the Old Testament with another example, Psalm 21:13, “Be thou exalted, LORD, in thine own strength: so will we sing and praise thy power.”
The New Testament uses mainly two Greek words, which are translated “power” in the King James Version. Matthew 6:13 reads:
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
“Power” here comes from dunamis. The English “dynamite” comes from dunamis, which BDAG, the foremost Greek New Testament lexicon, says means:
potential for functioning in some way, power, might, strength, force, capability
That Greek word is used 120 times in the New Testament. The very next usage of “power” in the New Testament is in Matthew 9:6:
But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.
1. a state of control over something, freedom of choice, right2. potential or resource to command, control, or govern, capability, might, power
1 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. 2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:
James 4:12, There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?Matthew 10:28, And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
The Fine-Tuning Argument, to be abbreviated by FTA in what follows, claims that the present Universe (including the laws that govern it and the initial conditions from which it has evolved) permits life only because these laws and conditions take a very special form, small changes in which would make life impossible.
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