New Truths for Old
I saw one of those defensively Christian car plaques today. This one was in the shape of a fish, filled with the word “truth,” that was eating a Darwin fish. Oh, and for those of you that don’t know, a Darwin fish is one of those line drawings (often embodied as a car plaque) of a fish with legs that may or may not be filled with the word Darwin. The Darwin fish is a symbol of somebody that believes in evolution the same way that a regular fish is a symbol of somebody that believes in Jesus Christ as their personal saviour.
Anyway, that got me to talk to God about the Christian belief that what they believe on faith alone is a bigger truth than those things for which we have actual scientifically valid evidence. To put it in the sort of terms that an ad campaign might use, the Christians feel that their view of God is “truer than true.” Or as Stephen Colbert might put it, the Christian view has something better than truth, it has “truthiness,” it’s true because it feels like it should be true.
Now God has told me time and again that he gave us our brains to use and that he expects us to revise our beliefs when we have good evidence that they’re not the best model of reality, so I pretty much expected that he’d tell me more of the same. What I didn’t expect though, was when he just said that truth is fleeting.
What did that mean, I wanted to know.
And now is the point where I tell you the great truth that God revealed to me about great truths, except that he didn’t. About the only thing further that I got out of him was that sometimes the truth changes, and when it does, well, about the only thing you can say then is that the old truth isn’t and the new truth is.
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