God's Truth?

One of the better points made by Dawkins in The God Delusion is about how religious thought acts counter to the inquisitive spirit. Those who are determined to find God like to find Him in the 'Gaps' between scientific explanations. So if we do not fully understand the transition from ape to man, say, we posit God as providing the helping hand. Arthur C Clarke posited the black monolith, but the effect is pretty much the same: we stop asking questions about the important things concerning man's development and instead start asking questions about abstract and absent things such as God or super-intelligent extra-terrestrials. Never mind that scientists are looking into something and developing workable and even elegant secular explanations, God - we are told - got there before them and has already provided the answers. In His world, truth (or rather Truth) is given only to those who do not question.

Of course, real truth is never actually given; it is extracted out of the nature of things by those who ask and attempt to answer the right questions. Scientists know how to ask the right questions within the narrow confines of the laboratory, but who is asking these questions in the world at large? Who is asking, for instance, whether the current economic crisis is really the fault of a handful of bankers, or whether it symptomatic of a problem of manufacturing productivity? More to the point, how could such questions be tested and answered outside the controlled environment of the lab?

Here we must venture into the world of politics, but not your everyday, madam-speaker-type politics. Not the politics of the professional politicians, but a politics born of an idea that has the potential to change someone's mind (OK, for the moment we'll leave aside the notion of theory becoming a material force when it grips the masses). So outside the laboratory change is not measured by comparing the outcome of an experiment against a control; change is measured in terms of numbers of people who now see things otherwise.

The truth is a standard of man, not God. But it is not ours in any ornamental sense. It is what we must continually extract and consume through our engagement with the world and our fellow man. It begins in the simple act of conversation, especially a conversation in which one party suddenly interrupts the other and says "Actually, you're wrong..."