Truth?

ahh...academia... how it doth kindle the flames of imagination...

This semester I'm taking two philosophy classes, History of Modern Philosophy, and Existentialism. Both of these should prove to be incredibly fun and enriching. Frankly, after a year studying at CIU with Dr. Gentry, I find no intimidation whatsoever in the thought of writing papers for what might normally be considered difficult classes. ha.

I'm currently reading from Descartes, and Kierkegaard. As such, my mind has awakened from it's Christmas dormancy... So I must write, lest my brain explode. Forgive me, as my writing method is a somewhat "stream of consciousness" style. I simply begin with a vague concept and see where it takes me. But anywhoo...

the more I understand how things are, the more I realize that I know nothing. That in fact, on a certain level, nothing can truly be known. The best mankind can achieve is an educated guess about anything. That's the paradox of non-omniscience. Unless we know everything, we most truly cannot know anything. Because every supposition rests on another supposition, which rests on another... Behind every established fact, their is always a question.

If that wasn't enough to convince you, then simply try your best to consider something simple, like a rock. You may know facts of what kind of minerals are in the rock, what the rock looks like, or maybe even what it tastes like, though why anyone would even wonder what a rock tastes like seems questionable to me... You can know any number of facts about this rock. You could make it your life's goal to study this rock, and get up every morning and look at it all day, and count the specks on it, and memorize the pattern...and even see how it tastes with other non edible objects if you want... Yet for all your laborious study of this rock, you can't know the rock itself, only facts ABOUT the rock. To truly know the rock, you would have to have every piece of information concerning the rock, and each of the atoms that forms the rock, their history, the path that the atoms' electrons take as they fly around... everything. You would then have to implement all of this knowledge into one moment of time and one single focused thought. Then, for that one moment, you would most truly know that rock.
For obvious reasons, this is humanly impossible. And thus, nothing can truly be known. So don't go around licking rocks because I can guarantee that it will probably not help your situation in any way.

So I've been thinking tonight about truth. What is it? That ultimate intellectual goal that we all strive after? God's Word? Most assuredly yes... The Bible is truth. Yet it is not the source of all truth, nor is it the extent of all truth. The truth of Scripture proceeds from God, who is himself the source of all truth, as he is the source of all that is.

I suppose that when we call something "truth" it's just a linguistic method by which we denote that something carries a particular aspect of God's nature. I think then, that any "established truth", might be considered for our purposes, to be an extension of God's being, rather than simply derivative of God's being. in other words, it is not true to say that all truth proceeds from God. It could more accurately be put, that God is truth.

Curses...

Whenever I stumble on an idea that strikes me as somewhat profound, it always leads me to something which is already well established and quite obvious. Though I suppose that fact just goes to prove my point. That which we call discovery is merely the act of us viewing God from a different angle, by which we perceive a particular facet of his being, and this we label "truth."

...Not knowing how else to end this excessively long post, I think I'll just harness the limitless power that Calvin and Hobbes quotation offers...

"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little pratice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"

This entire blog... summed up in two sentences.
Brilliant.