Like I said yesterday, the most controversial statement from my college career was from my philosophy class with Professor Mano, when he said “No one has a monopoly on truth, not even God.”
There’s a lot to unpack in that. It’s one thing to say “There’s no God, so there’s not Truth”. But this statement went beyond that; even if there’s a God, it says, that God still doesn’t own Truth.
An immediate response would be “But, God knows everything! He (or She, or It) knows everything everyone is thinking, and from their perspective can arrive at the Truth!”
That perspective, though, it key: God (and whoever else) is always operating from a particular perspective. We might thing that above it all perspective is much better from the limited one, but that perspective can’t choose to become limited — the mind of God always knows what it knows. So when the whirlwind confronts Job, it might know all the mysteries that it claims. But it can never know what it is to not know those mysteries, to truly feel helpless, and to truly feel alone.
One may then bring up the Suffering Servant — in being and tortured and dying, didn’t he (temporarily at least) know both sides of the Truth? If there was truly a gap, if he truly separated from Divine Knowing, than the Truth there was still distinctly different from the Divine’s.
All this sort of hangs on a description of Truth that includes meaning; what meaning we assign to things vs. what others assign to it. Meaning, to me, and I believe my professor, has much to do with Truth. It’s bigger than just a fact, or set of facts. From the more nihilistic side of things, one could say “Well, there is no True meaning, so no Truth”. This again tries to monopolize Truth, discrediting the meanings of others.
What I took from my Professor in all this was that in life, we are ultimately creating our own meaning, whether or not we are creating our own circumstances. So often people will encounter a certain philosophy, Stoicism perhaps, or maybe a different spirituality, Buddhism say, and then experience a huge change in perspective. Their circumstances haven’t changed, but how they interpret them, their meaning to them, changes radically. And that’s what I see as the meaning behind no one has a monopoly on Truth — not matter what we can take control of our meanings. Sometimes that can lead us to finding better circumstances, sometimes it can’t, but our final evaluation of our lives is up to us.
