How invested are you in truth?

If such a spectrum were to be mapped out, I would place myself somewhere between belief and truth, closer moreso to the latter than the former.

I'll use your God example.

As a Christian, I believe in God as He is described in the bible. However, I often find myself conflicted in my faith because nobody is capable of furnishing any tangible proof, only passionate speculation.

I feel 100% confident in saying that there is a god moreso than saying "my God is real and your gods are not", only because the afforementioned proof is at this point unattainable. But for me, believing that existence "just kinda happened" makes no sense to me. If that were the case, that would mean there was at one point or another non-existence. I have never experienced non-existence, so I find the idea of it unfathomable. This is why I believe in an infinite creator and an afterlife.

That's the belief side.

The truth side is my unwillingness to tell others that I am dedinitely right and they are definitely wrong unless I can furnish absolutely irrefutable evidence.

But who is the arbiter of truth? We certainly cannot consider it to be a human, since humans have limited perception, and thus only experience a sliver of reality. We cannot appeal to God, as we do not know that word really means and he/she/it has not ascended to Earth to teach us truth. We cannot appeal to science, because science deals with approximation models and only describes small, isolated aspects of the universe, and only through the abstraction of mathematical models. So when you say "the truth is the truth," who or what is being referred to?

I'm glad you made this thread because this is a question I had on my mind since I watched a debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson on this very topic. The debate was supposed to be about something else but Sam wouldn't proceed until they came to a mutual understanding of the definition of truth, which they couldn't come to terms on.

Sam's argument was that there's an objective truth to every avenue of science. As the pursuit for the truth continues, we can compile all the irrefutable evidence to eliminate any reasonable doubt or variance of our understanding of things. Think of a murder trial. If there's finger prints on the gun, a written journal entry by the killer in his handwriting in a book located on his property, the victims blood found on his clothes that fits the profile of the witness testimony, and recorded video of the killer shooting the person, there's isn't any reliable evidence that suggests that the suspect didn't shoot that person.

Jordan refutes that the truth can never be objective because the quest to find it will invariably be tampered by human curiosity, and moral justification, and truth couldn't exist without that. Our interpretation of truth ceases to exist once it stops being relevant to us

Sam responds with an example that if scientists were to study some sort of nanovirus that leaks out of the lab and kills every human being left on the planet, the truth remains that the nanovirus kills, whether anyone is left to observe it or not.

Jordan retorts that if a nanovirus killed every living thing on earth, and by extension every living thing in the universe, the fact that the nano virus can kill living things is null because it's a theory that can't reliably be tested in a universe where life and death no longer exists.

They go back and forth with more specific examples but it's a pretty fascinating demonstration of mental gymnastics. To this day I'm not totally sure what I agree with. At first I was on Sam's side but as the debate continued I found Jordan Peterson's interpretation of the truth to be more likely. We understand truth in a manner that depends on it being relevant to us. Our understanding of the truth can exist and not exist depending on what it is we desire to know. For example, you could say that Doom has a limit of 128 visplanes. This is true. There is documented evidence of it in the source code, and we can test it in the game. However, there are two circumstances that could happen that can eliminate this truth from ever existing:

1. Doom was never created in the first place.

2. Doom magically dissappears from the universe, so no one can play it. The elements in which we can reliably test this information are fiction, until we create a new game, call it Doom, and frame it to coincide with that truth, which wouldn't make any sense to begin with.

It's a very touchy subject, especially when you consider the perspective issues involved with being human, such as that we only have five senses in which to observe things. Our eyes for example, only have 3 cones of visible color vision (RGB). I forget the details but I recall reading somewhere that there is a species of caterpillar that can see through many hundreds of cones of visible color vision, which means they see the world in a far more visually profound way in which we as humans don't even have the capacity to understand. What if there are other senses in which to observe the universe that are outside of our reach by our own human biology? Such as some alternate form of smell that we don't posess the receptors to receive and interpret in our brain? How can we determine those things exist? I think Jordan Peterson is right because truth only exists through the limited scope in which we have the capacity to understand it.