Triangulating the Truth

In the Age of Misinformation, how can we know what is true?

We live in the Age of Misinformation. It is all too easy to surf into a television channel, radio station, or website that caters to one’s specific bias. Conservative or liberal, theist or atheist, Eastern or Western, scientific or spiritual — every bias is represented in mass media these days, along with every kind of conspiracy theory imaginable. But none of this has anything to do with reality, and those who claim to know the absolute truth are the furthest removed from it. So then, how are we to determine what is true and what is not true?

One could argue that it has always been this way, that truth is elusive, and that every age has its deceivers, propagandists, and peddlers of complete nonsense. But there is more so-called information coming at us today than ever before, and the average person has no way to filter it.

What Is Truth?

Truth is one of those concepts that we can only grasp by considering its opposite: falsity. It is easy enough to reveal what is untrue, but to say what is true in the truest sense of the word nearly impossible.

Absolute truth takes us into the unknown — into that realm commonly referred to as metaphysics. None of us knows all there is to know about the world in which we live or the universe at large, and that is what absolute truth requires. All we can do is speculate about it. Like blind men and women touching an elephant at different places, trying to determine what it is, we all give different reports.

Seven centuries ago, Meister Eckhart riddled:

What is truth? Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep to the truth and let God go.

Clever man that Medieval mystic, knowing all too well that he would never have to make that hard choice. After all, truth and the idea of God go hand in hand, and truth is just as elusive as the mind of God. But this insight doesn’t help us in the day-to-day busines of living our lives, does it? Back to that original question then: How can we determine what is true?

Triangulating the Truth

Every seasoned bushwhacker has been lost in a sprawling wilderness at one time or another. “Disoriented” is a better word for it because “lost” implies some degree of panic that is not necessarily part of the experience.

Whenever this disorientation happens to me, I climb to the top of the nearest hill and use a map and compass to triangulate my position. That is, I shoot a bearing towards a landmark in one direction, mark that line on my map, then shoot two more bearings to landmarks in completely different directions. The three lines intersect, creating a triangle on my map, and that tells me where I am.

Two bearings don’t tell you much. One bearing tells you nothing at all. At least three bearings shot in completely different directions are necessary to create a triangle on the map, to orient yourself. The more accurate the bearings, the smaller the triangle, therefore the better idea you have about where you are. Not an exact position but close enough. With GPS systems so readily available these days, this is fast becoming a lost art. But it works.

I do the same thing while reading history or the daily news. I take a long, hard look at things from one perspective — one report of events — then consider an entirely different perspective. That alone doesn’t tell me much. But when I add a third, completely different perspective I get a rough idea what really happened — what is true and what is not true. I call this triangulating the truth. Others call it critical thinking.

So long as a person is locked into only one way of seeing the world, the truth of it remains elusive. Whenever two perspectives are considered — black/white, left/right, yin/yang — a spectrum is created, but this doesn’t say much about what is real. Only when three or more perspectives are considered can one get at some reasonable idea of what has happened in the past or what is happening right now. It this way the truth can be approximated.

Nature Loves to Hide

The natural world is reality. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was the first person to say that nature loves to hide. But, as the contemporary science writer Chet Raymo pointed out, all Western philosophy addresses this hiddenness. I’d venture one step further and say that all science, philosophy, and religion address it. In his book When God is Gone Everything is Holy, Raymo went on to say:

Nature loves to hide. And we are driven by nature and nurture to peel away her veils, to discover what is hidden.

Therein lies the unquenchable thirst that drives humankind to make sense of the world in which we live, to fully understand it. The quest begins the minute one asks: What is truth? And this is a quest that has no end.

Nature loves to hide. It hides in plain sight. The truth of the natural world is right in front of us, but we can’t see it because of our biases. If one thinks critically enough, it is possible to formulate some rough idea about what is true. But that requires a level of objectivity that is difficult to achieve. In the Age of Misinformation, it is extremely difficult for anyone to do that.

The Physical and the Metaphysical

Science is the method by which we establish facts about nature, about the physical world in which we live. It works quite well for us in this regard. Science works quite well when it comes to understanding the particulars of nature, but it cannot tell us what the whole of it is.

The fundamental force of Nature, the whole of it, is a metaphysical phenomenon. In other words what drives nature, what causes all the particulars to come into being and function as they do isn’t something we can extract from the particulars alone.

The nature of Nature itself is the most challenging of all truths to reveal. I suspect that the only way to triangulate this ultimate truth is to look long and hard at science, philosophy and religion, and pay close attention to where they intersect. This is a highly speculative notion, of course. In truth, we all may be out of our depth here.

The ultimate reality of infinite and eternal Nature, the absolute truth of it, is something the human mind cannot grasp. But we may be able to approximate What-Is. The Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:

I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or the real, and the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish.

Like Emerson I too await that insight, and am convinced that science will provide enough bona fide information about the laws of nature for us to make some sense of What-Is. But nature loves to hide so this won’t be an easy task — especially not in the Age of Misinformation. And we must be prepared in our pursuit of truth to let go of all our false gods and let Nature be whatever it is. I for one don’t expect this to happen any time soon.