Is that true?

In my “day” job, I work with college students, and I’ll always remember a conversation one of my peers had.

A student told him that they believed truth is relative. Basically, it’s flexible, depending on your beliefs and experiences.

My peer’s response was simply to ask, “Is that true?”

When I heard this, I laughed. If all truth is relative, then is that statement itself only relatively true?

It seems like a paradox. But the more I’ve thought about it...

Defining “truth” is more complicated than I used to think.

In John 8:32, Jesus Christ says, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Only ten chapters later, as he’s awaiting his death sentence, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate asks him: “What is truth?”

I wonder if that question feels even more relevant today than it was 2000 years ago.

We now live in a polarized world where two people can look at the same event and walk away with completely different conclusions.

Some say the world is on the brink of disaster—others say it’s becoming better than we ever could have imagined.

And then there are the bigger questions.

All of us are here on this planet, but we can’t prove why.

Technically, I can’t even prove that the universe wasn’t created yesterday. I can’t prove that life isn’t all a dream.

Sure, there are plenty of things that seem certain. The earth is round. Gravity is real. Our bodies are made of cells.

But then there are the deeper assumptions we use to make sense of everything else.

I think of axioms in mathematics—starting points that aren’t proven within the system itself, but that allow the rest of the system to work.

Science depends on starting assumptions, too: that the universe is intelligible, that our observations tell us something real about it, and that universal laws will continue to hold.

If we don’t assume those things are true, then science and reason have no foundation at all. We have to trust some things, even if we can’t prove them to be reliable. And this reminds me that…

There isn’t much we can be 100% certain about.

We all have starting assumptions. We all trust certain sources, experiences, evidence, and interpretations more than others. And eventually, we still have to decide what we believe.

I suppose that’s the scary part.

No matter how badly we want all the answers, there are some questions we may never be able to settle completely.

And yet we still have to live. We still have to make decisions. We still have to decide what (or who) we trust.

And this is one of the questions that inspired my upcoming novel, Observation.

I’m excited to share more about it with you as we get closer to release. In the meantime, if you haven’t read my first free short story yet, you can find it here.

(And I’ll have another free story to share with you over the holidays!)

Thanks for reading,

J. W. Pierce