What Is Truth Research Paper

đź“ŚCategory: Elections, Government, United States, World
đź“ŚWords: 1217
đź“ŚPages: 5
đź“ŚPublished: 15 January 2022

The other day I was at work, when my coworker Mason entered the room and made a comment about an experience he had talking to one of his friends on social media. His friend had posted an article on his story saying that more people had voted than the number of people that had registered to vote. Mason said he thought that was interesting so he went to check the stats. He went to the Idaho Secretary of State website, and noticed that the claim that his friend had made was false, because the voter registration numbers were 360,000 and the actual votes cast were about 310,000. Mason then brought this up to his friend, who then got super upset with him for bringing it up and told him he was a Trump supporter and aggressively demanded that Mason should get out of his DM’s. I thought this was an interesting situation from the perspective of thinking about the idea of truth. To Mason, truth was represented with the statistical numbers presented from the credible source of the state. To his friend, truth resided in the biased media that he had consumed. These views were so different, there is no way that both individuals could be correct. It was up to both individuals to figure out which perspective was correct when all of the information was presented. They were left to ask, “What Is Truth?” This is the question that I am going to address today.

To begin, I would like to address the impact of truths and beliefs. Ryan Skinnell, an opinion contributor from The Hill addressed this in an article titled: “Checking Facts is the Wrong Way to Understand Political Persuasion”. He begins by talking about how in an ideal society, voters would be swayed by truths being exposed from each side, however that isn’t the way our system is built. He stated, “In this model, facts are not worthless, but they’re also not the point. Providing a reason to dislike, or better yet be revolted by, the other party is the main point. Anything that accomplishes this goal is on the table. This is as true for the Democrats as it is for Republicans”. This comment shows the influence of changing people’s minds based on things that aren’t necessarily true. If facts were the point, and if people sought for truth, then providing reasons for groups to dislike a separate party would be unnecessary. However, it is critical that this does not happen. It is far easier to say things about other groups of people that bring them down than it is to provide facts that bring your party up. In such a situation, people often leave feeling confused and disappointed in the conversation rather than feeling like they actually grasp what each party’s goals and plans are for action in the future. It is far more important to know these goals than it is to know about another party’s past, but since changing people’s beliefs about another party is so easy to influence, it pushes the parties to focus their attention on changing beliefs rather than presenting facts. This is what happened in the situation with Mason and his friend, Mason found truth within the facts, however, his friend had previous beliefs that prevented him from seeing the truth within the facts that were presented. 

One of the best examples of facts presenting truth is within the scientific field, however not all of science is represented within facts. In his article “Science Does Not Reveal Truth” for the Forbes magazine, astrophysicist Paul Sutter clarifies this “Science represents reality, and we try to be as faithful and accurate as possible so we can get an ever deeper and ever more fundal fundamental understanding of the way the world works…..Science doesn't deal in truth. Science deals in…science..” As Sutter described, there is an inconsistency between peoples’ expectations of science and the reality that science is only partially based in truth. There are hypotheses and theories and explanations that are only there as long as they are not proven incorrect. This helps to clarify the difference between facts and science. Not all facts are science, and not all science is fact, but all facts are truth, whether or not they are science.

It is important to note that not all science is fact because people believe so deeply in science. There is a large difference between belief and truth, and understanding this difference is crucial to discovering what truth is. In Paul Pardi’s article from philosophynews.com titled “What Is Truth?”, he talks about the differences between beliefs and fundamental truths. In addressing this matter he says: “Beliefs can be about false propositions and thus be ‘wrong’ because the person accepts them as true. This is a critical distinction. While a proposition has to be true or false, beliefs can be about true or false propositions even though a person always accepts them as being true”. In this quote, Pardi brings up the fact that beliefs can be about true or false things, even though the proposition could be incorrect. In Mason’s case, his friend had a belief that was about an incorrect fact. On the other hand, Mason had a belief based on a true statistical fact. This fact was a fundamental truth. These fundamental truths come from universal laws that cannot be proven incorrect, and therefore provide an ultimate stability that anyone can rely upon. 

This distinction between facts(truths) and beliefs shows how stable and consistent facts are compared to the malleable thoughts and opinions of others. In his address titled “Truth Telling” Robert Bird speaks to the BYUI students on this topic remarking that: “the marvel of truth is that it is self-sustaining; it needs no artificial support”. This is different than with beliefs, where people may question things and it changes the validity of their beliefs. In the case of the political rhetoric in Mason’s story, while it might be easier to convince a person to not trust one party or another, it is all based on stories, and if those stories are not based in truth, it can backfire on a party. Therefore, truth is the essence of fact, creating a stable foundation on which belief can thrive.

Belief can thrive off of truth, but truth is independent of belief. This is important to recognize, as it allows truth to be consistent and unbiased. In his talk titled “What Is Truth?”, Dieter F. Uchtdorf of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles said it best: “The thing about truth is that it exists beyond belief. It is true even if nobody believes it”. It is not possible for truth to exist based off of belief, because then it would be inconsistent. The consistent stability of fact is what makes truth, truth. Beliefs are different because they change. Facts are established and revealed truth. Mason started the story believing what his friend said, and then changed his belief when found more reliable information than his friend shared. The information had always been there, Mason just had to find it. Truth is eternal and always has been one way, and always will be one way. In the end, people will believe what they want when they are presented with the facts, so it is critical that people are open to changing their beliefs as more truths are uncovered.

In the case of Mason and his friend, Mason saw something presented as fact, and chose to investigate the legitimacy of the belief. As a result, he was able to uncover the truth. However, when he shared that with his friend, his friend did not accept it because of his beliefs. In the end we conclude that the points that Mason brought to the table were legitimate, because they were fact based, compared to the unstable beliefs that his friend shared. Truth is eternal, and should be prioritized above belief.

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