Coffee Talk Redux is a reflection on things God is teaching me. In some cases the ideas for these topics may arise from some conversation I may have had with someone, or a thought that crossed my mind, something I have written, or perhaps something I read somewhere, or maybe a combination of all of these. In any case think of this as a discussion on what God is teaching us to help us grow in our understanding of His will for us.
The Apostle John recounts in John 18:37 that when Jesus was brought before Pilate He says to him, “for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” In the next verse, a puzzled Pilate then asks Jesus a simple but yet a very profound question, “What is truth?” Pilate as a pagan is wondering how is man to know or to even recognize the truth? This is a question that an even more confused world continues to ask even to this day. However, Jesus tells us where the truth lies. Jesus says in John 14:6 that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” But man because of his free will has a choice to make. Is the truth he seeks found within the world or as Christ says does the truth transcend creation?Man now lives in an era of moral relativism and subjectivism, two similar philosophies that argue that there is no absolute truth or certainty about anything. That truth depends on factors that are not constant for example truth is particular to a person, the place, the time, and the circumstances. Moral relativism and subjectivism means that truth is relative and personal and that there are no human actions that are inherently evil. Today man wants to live as if there is no God and religion to impose on his freedom. God has been replaced with a “practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism, and hedonism (Evangelium Vitae 23).” Man finds his freedom in this practical materialism of a life focused on having and serving his personal well-being while ignoring the essence of his being, the fact that he is made in the image of God.
In this new moral relativism based on the idea of pluralism any transcendent truth or moral standard is just seen as being irrelevant or seen as a challenge to one’s personal freedom or beliefs. Pluralism also implies that one is entitled to their own beliefs about God and some may choose atheism and not have any belief in God. Pope Paul VI in Gaudium et Spes (19) says that “atheism must be accounted among the most serious problems of this age.” Pluralism also leads to the condition where we are told to be sensitive to the beliefs of others and not to be judgmental or not to impose our values or religious beliefs on others. In this new freedom found in pluralism believers can even form their own churches and religious sects defining at their whim the doctrines and practices that define their religion with no consideration of tradition. Also known as denominationalism this has lead to a fracturing of the Christian faith with the result that there is no longer the unity that was extant at the first Pentecost. Even Christ at the time of His Passion prayed for the unity of His Church saying in John 17:21, “that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” But this unity that Christ prayed for has been replaced by diversity amongst believers resulting in indifferentism.
Within indifferentism religion loses its creedal basis along with the idea that there are fundamental truths that one must believe in order to be truly a Christian and to gain eternal life. Some of these newer denominations have even demythologized Christ to where He becomes nominal, just another good teacher repeating the same message that has been heard many times before. All of this points to a real religious or spiritual crisis in the sense that man no longer sees a higher law or power, man no longer sees that there is a God and His absolute truth that serves as our guide out of the morass we constantly find ourselves in. This is what is meant in Genesis 3:5 when Satan as the serpent says to Eve “and you will be like God.” This is what man wants in this new world order known as secularism, to be free of his Creator, free of His natural law, and to be his own master. That man’s reason alone is sufficient for arriving at the truth explaining all that he needs to know to understand his place in the world.
Confronted with these challenges apologetics as a science “aims to explain and justify religious doctrine [by showing] the reasonableness of such doctrine in the face of the objections offered by those who refuse to accept any religion, especially Christianity and … Roman Catholicism (Pocket Catholic Dictionary 25).” The style of Christian apologetics is to defend the faith based on the wise instruction of St. Peter as given in 1 Peter 3:15-16, “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” An apologetics approach today must therefore address the basic question of whether or not there is such a thing as objective truth, “because today most arguments between Christians and non-Christians eventually come down to this point (Handbook of Christian Apologetics 362)” Most non-Christians when losing an argument about Christianity will fall back on the defensive position that truth is relative and “What right do you have to impose your beliefs on me? You’re being judgmental (ibid.)”
To a Christian apologist the idea of objective truth means that it is “independent of the knower and his consciousness (ibid 364).” On this basis it can be argued that truth is not personal, as a pragmatist would believe; hence truth is not relative or subjective. Truth is also not empirical and limited to just what one can sense since “some things we sense are not true and some things that we all know are true are not sensed (ibid. 365).” Truth also cannot be limited to that which can only be understood or proved by reason since not all truths are provable by rational arguments. In addition truth is not simply a “coherence or oneness or harmony among a set of ideas,” since this results in a linguistic confusion that changes the inherent meaning of truth to what it is not. Furthermore truth is not an emotion since feelings can be wrong “and many truths are not felt emotionally at all (ibid. 366).” With this understanding of the meaning of absolute truth one can begin to see how to refute the most common objections to Christian faith that are found in those that hold to religious skepticism or moral and religious subjectivism.
Religious skepticism argues that while “we may know objective truth in nonreligious fields, especially the sciences, we can’t know objective truth in religion (ibid. 367).” A religious skeptic argues that it is impossible to know anything about God. But this means, “we know God so well that we can know that he cannot be known? How can we know that God cannot and did not reveal himself? (ibid. 371)” Although skepticism comes across as being humble it is really an arrogance arising from basic ignorance of religious doctrines and facts. Moral subjectivism fails to recognize any objective or absolute truths and replaces the idea of absolutes with values that are considered to be personal or relative. When applied to arguments regarding faith, this leads to religious subjectivism, which “sees religion as ‘true for you but not for me (ibid. 368).’” Religious subjectivism is based on the premise that truth is personal and that religion is therefore something that man has made up. The subjectivist approach is to argue that there are no objective truth claims in religion and when challenged on this they tend to fall into a “vague, general ideology or prejudice that ‘science’ contradicts ‘religion’ (ibid. 379).” The approach for refuting religious subjectivism is to keep them focused on the objective truths of religion. That “there are no contradictions between science and religion.” For example, the “moral goods or values that religion directs us to are just as objective as the goods of medicine… so religion points us to real, objective health and healing for the soul: salvation, sanctity, enlightenment, spiritual health, reconciliation with God (ibid. 380).”
These are difficult times to be a Christian. Our world today no longer views truth as being absolute or transcendent, for most people in today’s world truth is relative or subjective, as Pilate says What is truth? These new forms of thought that are based on relativism and subjectivism are challenging the Christian faith today. However, by keeping the focus on the existence of objective truths it is possible to develop an apologetics approach that can refute these challenges. (Ronald L. Fournier © 2009)
