Introduction
I was had.
Round about midnight he hobbled into the emergency department favoring his right ankle. The other was wrapped tightly with a plastic Walmart bag and stuffed into an untied boot. I brought him back into the department, got the story, took some vitals. He had exacerbated an old injury in his left foot walking around town all day; homelessness didn’t afford much time for rest, I guess.
The original injury, he recounted, was from Vietnam when he fractured his ankle falling from a helicopter as he was being airlifted from Saigon. He sustained a second injury to the same foot while playing for the White Sox against the Royals in a double header on a Sunday in June, sliding into third. Pretty incredible. Again, for the third time, his foot was injured running back a kickoff for a touchdown in a playoff game during the Buffalo Bills 1986 undefeated season.
Hmm.
I don’t know if it was the timeline of how his story was playing out or if the fact that his 135 pounds, 5’4” frame didn’t jive with what I know of any professional sport, except for maybe ping pong. Plus, in ’86 the Bills sucked.
So I looked in his medical history and there it was: schizophrenia.
As far as schizophrenia goes, his was a merry case. The man had woven a mythology to explain his foot pain in a way that is way more interesting than reality, which was that it was run over by a car in a parking garage in Milwaukee.
This is not common in my experience with schizophrenia, which, having worked in emergency departments from the bowels of Florida to poo-strewn streets of Los Angeles, is fairly extensive. Most have features of paranoia, or fixated thoughts of parasites, or some religious delusion through which they explain all happenings in their world. Sadly, reorienting them to reality does not work, as all experiences fall into the orbit of a central belief, are interpreted by it, and given meaning through it.
And so it is impossible to reorient them to the external world because all information you would give them has already been accounted for, has already been given context by their tiny, central Sun by which they see everything. There is a secret cabal of men hunting me. Why else would that man be scratching his nose? The woman on the park bench is alerting the drug cartel of my presence; the book she is reading is only a diversion. Any pain, itch, twitch and pimple is due to the parasites crawling under my skin. There’s one, can’t you see it? All the various experiences of life have conspiratorial significance, and orbit around the self-fulfilling, self-supporting axioms of their singular belief.
There is a trend toward similar outcomes among healthy minds, a trend that is waxing as the light of modernity wanes and the dying sun of postmodernism, red and swollen, reaches noon. That is the abandonment of objective Truth in exchange for “my truth”. Certainly you have smelled this this kind of halitosis wafting from people’s mouths. Perhaps you even have said it yourself.
“My truth” is the declaration that a person’s experience, feelings, anecdotes and preferences determine truth. It is the bespoke biosphere of each persons tiny moral vivarium, the ecosystem of the inner world hermetically sealed. It is the movement away from a common Truth shared in the public square with a locus outside the self, to a customizable, personal, belief system that has the self at the center. Like the schizophrenic, the postmodern mind is self-validating. External realities are filtered through internal standards.
What I would like to do here is introduce you to the two theories of truth, explain how they are meant to work together, and how the abandonment of one has led to the postmodern mind’s frailty. As you will see, the subjectivity of truth takes a peculiar form, and understanding this will lead to a better way to engage with our current societal schizophrenia. Lastly, I want to offer a suggestion for how to engage the mind suckling on the pacifier of “personal truth.”
Though you may not be familiar with theories of truth, they are daily realities for you and constantly in use, and as interactive as your daily tryst with the laws of physics. A man falling off of a ladder will do so at 9.8 m/s2 regardless of his ability to do the math. In the same way, we all interpret our entire world through the Correspondence and Coherence Theories of truth, ignorance notwithstanding.
Correspondence Theory
This one is pretty easy, folks. Correspondence Theory of truth says that there is a connection between the external world and my internal perception of it. Quite simply, it is how a belief corresponds to objective reality. My internal belief that a man will fall from a ladder when I push him off of it can be verified or falsified by testing that belief. If my belief does correspond to reality, then I admit the belief into my world as true, and he is admitted to the hospital.
True beliefs and statements correspond to an actual state of affairs in the world that our perception cannot alter. God saw fit to give us five physical senses in our flesh and common sense in our minds for us to tether ourselves thus to the outside world and live in unity with it. For my happy schizophrenic, his belief that he thrice injured his ankle in incredible circumstances does not correspond to history or fact, as could be demonstrated by a quick search for sports team rosters and such. The axiom, the center of my belief superstructure, is tethered to an external world outside myself that I interact with and internalize to form my conception of reality.
You may wonder why we even need to grace this common sense with the nobility of a whole theoretical name, but philosophers in general get pretty finicky when ideas are left to float around without the appropriate nomenclature. Parsing out reality can be tedious and they don’t want to complicate things with unnecessary confusions.
Of course, we have the Greeks to thank for describing things to death. Aristotle somewhat hazily described this same concept thus:
“To say that which is, is not, and that which is not, is, is a falsehood; therefore, to say that which is, is, and that which is not, is not, is true.”
Aristotle, Metaphysics
I took the liberty of translating this into Gen Z lingo for some of the younger readers out there.
To say that which is no cap, is cap, and that which is cap is no cap, is cap, bruh. Therefore, to say that which is no cap, is no cap, and that which is cap, is cap, is no cap.”
A-rizz-totle
Very good, that one was easy; correspondence theory of truth is how statements or beliefs correspond to objectively reality and can be falsified or verified by observation. The added benefit of this is that you, me, the schizophrenic, and the guy I pushed off the ladder can all test our internal beliefs with objective reality. There is a communal aspect to our beliefs in that we can all gather around the same truth table and eat in unity. No body gets to cheat by taking exception to reality we all share.
Coherence
Coherence Theory of truth is a bit trickier. It says that a belief is accepted as true based on how it coheres with other internal, established beliefs. New truth claims are cross referenced with previously accepted truths which verify or falsify the claim; it is an internal vetting process.
This is useful because we can arrive at the decision to believe a proposition or not in light of other established beliefs without having to go through the painstaking process of having to first re-prove all previous beliefs via correspondence. When I read the nutrition facts on the back of my Raisin Bran, I admit the 7 grams of dietary fiber seamlessly into my belief system because they comport with other beliefs I already hold as true (trust in FDA regulations for nutritional reporting, belief in process of determining fiber content, belief in good faith of Kellogg’s to not lie, etc.). Not only do I not verify the 7 grams of fiber, I wouldn’t even know how to go about doing that, so the fact that I don’t have to admit it via correspondence is quite handy.
Both correspondence and coherence are meant to work together for us to form an intelligible understanding of the world that is really there.
Here we reach a curious chicken and egg paradox. Which comes first, the correspondence or coherence? Is the center of beliefs the objectivity of the external world? Or do I admit the validity of the correspondence theory because it coheres already with a more central, preconceived assumption of what is true? Indeed, what is at the center of anyone’s belief system?
Beautiful and unique snowflakes
An axiom is a self-evident proposition; it is what you take to be true without having to prove it, what you take for granted. We all have axioms, whether clear to us or not, and often what we think are our axioms turn out not to be our true axioms at all, which interrogation can discover.
I like to think of belief systems like snowflakes. Snowflakes are formed through a process called nucleation, where water molecules floating in the clouds glom onto a piece of dust or particle of pollen, freeze, and from this seed crystal other water molecules build their beautiful geometric scaffolding. Without this central particle of dust, there will be no snow flake. The six arms of the snow flake is due to the hexagonal foundation that six water molecule take when they hold hydrogen hands around the particle, and the infinite variation of how the water molecules hold hands accounts for the uniqueness of each flake. Looks like the image to the right.
Like snowflakes, people have a central particle around which their belief structure forms. Another name for this belief structure is a worldview. Without exception, that little globby particle in the middle, whatever it is, is there by an act of faith. No one can prove their axioms; they are taken for granted. All worldviews are faith positions.
A worldview is a set of beliefs about what reality is and how it works. It is your own philosophy of life, and this philosophy provides a lens through which we view the world. It is our central presuppositions, our axioms, the central assumptions of what we believe to be true, the foundation upon which we build our understanding of the world.
The Bible tells us where to start forming our belief structure and what should be at that piece of pollen at the hexagon’s center.
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge
Proverbs 1:7
There it is. The fear of the Lord means that we acknowledge His authority as author of all reality and that there is an objective way to understand the world. The world is not dependent on me to build it for it to be there. I can seek that truth, take inside my world and then arrange my worldview around that central reality. Correspondence and coherence work together as I seek out and wrestle with reality to make sense of it.
When the fear of the Lord is abandoned, we break free from the burdens of the objective world He created and start the incremental process of going mad. This is both a personal and cultural certainty. If you haven’t noticed, we are there. We have reached a level of cultural madness such that the Cheshire Cat is slowly backing away from and the Mad Hatter is calling for security.
This is because the seed crystal of our worldview is a firm belief in the axiomatic self, and only what coheres with this central reality is admitted into our worlds. Even the rock solid certainty of correspondence, like gender and sex, is dismissed with handwaving and fingers plunged into ears, as it is in clear contradiction to the life verse of our time:
The love of the SELF is the beginning of knowledge
Pronouns 1:7
Coherence is a tool, and that tool will work the same regardless of what assumption is at the center of the snowflake. Because it is a tool, it is the hand that hold the tool that is responsible for its use. Nevertheless, when the core of a person’s worldview has a tiny altar to image of the self, coherence will do its work dutifully to admit or deny beliefs that jive with the center, even if one of those beliefs is that correspondence itself is subject to coherence.
Let me tell take you back to that point in time where I think this began to change, then I want to give a handy tool to rethink how to converse with people about the truth.
Digging To The Bottom
We have Renee Descartes to thank for the dominance of this strange coherence. Descartes was a certified polymath, hated getting up before noon, and has a dyspeptic look in all his portraits that gives you the impression he is sick of explaining things to you. His philosophical mic drop – I think therefore I am – came after a rather dark and probing misadventure of trying to find absolute certainty.
To do this, he started by systematically doubting everything – God, math, his own senses – he had all but thought himself and everything else out of existence. But if he was thinking there must be something to do the thinking. It, whatever it is, must exist, and his famous idiom cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am- became the foundation stone upon which all his disassembled reality would be rebuilt. Self was now the starting point and locus of truth, the singularity from which all truth would expand into increasing knowledge.
What Descartes had done, though he hadn’t realized at the time, was to upend the foundation of reality that had existed up to that point. The Bible taught that God, not man, was the starting point of all reasoning. Regardless of human intuition, experience, or authority, there existed a Truth outside the human mind that had its beginning in the infinite and immutable God. Even before the Church, transcendent reality formed the cornerstone of Western thought in the form of Platonic reasoning, which said that everything that existed did so according to its “form”, its essence. God had been displaced as the axiom-center of the cultural snowflake and became a dependent variable.
We are all Descartes philosophical grandpuppies. For a time, the ubiquity of religion in life kept our coherence and correspondence functioning as intended. But as God has been tossed aside like a bag of moldy tangerines, there exists nothing outside our minds to whom we are accountable.
As Nietzsche predicted, after the death of God, we became unchained from the sun and are moving forward and backward through empty space, and have had to become little suns ourselves, with our own little gravitational tug, as we try to fuss and wine our way into getting others to fall in orbit around our personal truths.
Or to say this in another way, when we reasoned away God we snipped our ties to the external world so that our beliefs no longer have to correspond, and we are free to build our own bespoke worldview that coheres around the tiny pollen speck of self. The most obvious example of this is the decoupling of gender and sex. A self-centric worldview means that the internal, psychological truth of believed gender is unaccountable to the external realities of penises and vaginas.
And so like the homeless hobbler in my anecdote above, with a central story of his heroism as the deciding factor in admitting or denying what will cohere, many today suffer from a spiritual schizophrenia. Triumph of the self – whatever that is is whatever they will it to be – is the criteria for forming their view of themselves and the world. Genitals have no correspondence value because correspondence does not cohere with the central belief, and is therefore disavowed.
However, it is not obvious even to the person who hold these beliefs that this is what they are doing, and neither is everyone aware of what is at the center of their worldview. It is an act of love and kindness to patiently help them explore these questions and help them maze towards the center and see what is there.
Finding The Center
One observation I have made over the years of nosing around in other’s worldviews is that most people have no idea by what standard they choose to admit or reject truth propositions. Some truths are verified by correspondence, others lay unbothered. This is because coherence allows the person to admit or reject based on the whims and changeableness of what the self wants to believe in the moment, whatever keeps it as the standard bearer.
One game I like to play when talking to other is asking them the Big Four questions and seeing how their answers cohere with each other and correspond to reality. These four questions are helpful in getting to the tootsie roll center of one’s worldview and revealing discrepancies. They are Where did everything come from? What is the meaning of life? How ought we to live with others? What happens when we die? All humans must, and have, answers the questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny.
If you ask people these questions you will make the following observations: 1) everyone loves to answer these questions 2) they love to answer them because no one ever asks them 3) they all have answers to each of these questions, even if they are not well thought through 4) they allow you to get a glimpse at the center of their coherence, 5) most people have a significant discrepancy between the answers to each question and 6) most people recognize this discrepancy as they make their way through their answers.
As useful as this tool is, it can do nothing to uproot the self as the center of the snowflake. It is only seeing the glory and blessing of solid ground that comes with faith in Jesus Christ that can dismount the self. But since Jesus is an objective reality outside the self, a person’s rules of coherence already has a category for religion, which is one’s “personal truth”, and its correspondence has no pull. And so helping to dismantle the reign of coherence through questions can be useful, indeed, necessary.
Conclusion
Supplanting God as the axiomatic center of our thinking has led to a schizophrenia where each self is busy building worlds according to their own rules. Long-term, this is not a viable option for any umber of reasons, not least of which is that sooner or later, world-building selves run afoul other world-building selves. And like it or not, life has a way of proving our axioms when they do not correspond to reality.
As a fun activity, try being mindful of coherence and correspondence throughout your day and trace your beliefs back to the center to see what is there. May you find the solid ground and thick gravity of the fear of the Lord and say, as Descartes should have said, “Deus est ergo sum”. God is, therefore I am.
Thought Butter 