Tautologies, we all know, are useless; definitions, meanwhile, are useful. Yet a definition, once we get down to the brass tacks of it, is very nearly a tautology; both sides of the equation, ideally, have not only the same meaning but no divergence of meaning- each side means all the same things and nothing more. The secret of the definition, of course, is that it conveys new information due to a semantic imbalance: I know what the words on one side mean, and I don’t know what the words on the other side mean. At least, that’s how it works when we’re dealing with relatively complex subjects- honey, fruit, trees, Germans, rocket science, tooth picks, etc. When we deal with simple things, like humanity, logic, time, truth, morality, or existence, the process starts to break down.

Now, if you’ve a philosophical bent, you may have noted that the things I listed as ‘simple’ are emphatically not simple as we usually intend the word. Morality is a vast topic, one no two men quite agree on, with folds and elements beyond counting. Humanity is the subject not only of philosophies like anthropology, sociology, and (to an extent) ethics but of more day-to-day consideration than any other topic besides God. Truth has been debated since the Garden- as Pilate asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). So I do not mean that these things are easily comprehended when I call them simple.

Instead, I mean that these are basic, irreducible concepts.¹ They are simple in the sense that they are not compounded out of other things, in our use.² Honey is food-sensation-color-texture-and-more; existence is existence. Try to define morality without reference to it or its synonyms or words defined by it (authority, ought, should, duty, right, wrong), at least in the Christian concept (and the concept people innately understand); you’ll fail. Defining simple terms is difficult because it seems at the end that they are self-defined, innately understood; the purpose of the definition is not so much to unite disparate pre-understood ideas, as when defining a swing as ‘a seat suspended by a rope or chains for swinging to and fro on for pleasure,’³  but to find some hook which contains the concept in order to drag it in bodily, dispensing the extraneous elements of whatever near-synonym was used. Actually, the process here is not remarkably far from the standard process- except that in dealing with simple categories of thought, definitions become simultaneously very tricky (because either the innate category is communicates or it isn’t, because of the metaphysical weight, and because people often haven’t given much thought to the definition or its context) and very important.

What is existence? Is ‘to exist’ a synonym of ‘to be perceived’ as George Berkeley decided? Is existence the same as nonexistence, as Nietzsche and the existentialists essentially came to believe? What about time? What is time? Shall we define ‘morality’? It may be a part of authority,⁴ as the Christian holds, or it may be a meaningless thing, an expression of motivation (Nietzsche) or force (Max Stirner). It may be the compulsion of social custom (Rousseau- he insisted morality was not produced by coercion, even as he proposed that it was a result of social pressure- of coercion). Of course, in any of those editions, any definition not based on authority, morality is meaningless (because the clear minded finds it logically impossible to be immoral (in the present tense) in a system based on motivation, force, or practicality).

Today, I’d like to consider two competing theories of ‘truth’: correspondence theory and coherence theory. I will not consider pragmatism, the theory that truth is what works, al a Dewey, or will-to-power, the Nietzschean theory (which the existentialists, his thought-children, iterated on) of truth as what the will decides,⁵ as both are obviously heretical, being irrationalist (Mal. 3:6), and make man into God by making him the active and effecting judge of existence (truth being the propositional form of existence).⁶

The correspondence theory of truth is that ‘truth is what corresponds to reality exterior to the proposition’ or ‘a true proposition is one which reflects-represents reality accurately.’ The coherence theory of truth is that ‘truth is what coheres with itself entirely,’ that a thing is true if it is consistent with the entirety of knowledge. Of these two, we will see, the correspondence theory of truth is by far superior, but our rejection of the coherence theory must not be unqualified.

The rectitude of a definition, of course, is in its correspondence to how it is used, though admittedly that’s a correspondence theory of truth definition (thus the definition coheres to itself). In other words, if the word ‘truth’ were commonly used to as a synonym for ‘dog’, one definition of it would indeed be ‘dog.’ In that sense, both definitions of truth are proper definitions: people use them. Of course, sometimes people equivocate the definitions, understand or use it in the correspondence sense when it is meant or understood in the coherence sense, but that’s a potential problem for all definitions.

The greater concerns are two. First, too often these two definitions of truth are treated as mutually exclusive, with one necessarily replacing the other wholesale if adopted. This theory would have that a correspondent truth cannot have respect to coherence or a coherent truth to correspondence. Second, truth bears a specific role in the thought of men in general and of Scripture in particular; if we use the wrong definition, we misstate what the term means in other’s mouths and in God’s mouth, with disastrous consequences, so that when God says that He is “the truth” (John 14:6) we would understand Him as meaning He is coherent, not that He is the real means of our salvation.

All this, the keen-eyed may object, remembering my earlier admission, I have said in presumption of the correspondence theory of truth, by demanding that what I say correspond to reality in order to be true. I accept the charge; more, I revel in it. I regard the presumption of the correspondence theory of truth as a component of God’s status as my basic presupposition, my axiom. Further, it is component to the innate rationality and perception-capacity which God created me with, as per Genesis 1:26-28, by which I can interact with a real external world in true (if incomplete) correspondence with it. God is real, exterior to myself; His coherence with reality is not a condition of His truth, though reality is coherent to Him (the order is important).

The coherence theory of truth, conversely, when tendered as a prime definition, is a product of rationalism, of presuming logic as the sole reliable epistemological basis (a task it is severely insufficient for). For the rationalists, to be real was to be rational, and to be rational was to be real. In other words, so long as it did not violate the law of noncontradiction with respect to the law of noncontradiction, it was thereby real- because it cohered to the premise. They were only a little bit right.

The thing is, coherence theory of truth is logical; it is even a little correct. All truth coheres to itself; all truth finally coheres to God, when fully comprehended. He is consistent with His truth, a fact that can be stated as it corresponding to Him or as cohering to Him. He is reality and reality’s source (having aseity, self-existence), and so saying truth coheres to God is just another way to say that truth corresponds to reality. To be clear, I do not equate ‘God’ and ‘reality’; rather, the quality of reality resides originally and independently in Him, with all other reality being contingent upon His granting of it. So cohering with God is corresponding to that-which-is-real because it is cohering to the reality of God (when speaking of Him directly) and because it is cohering with Him by cohering with the reality He has decreed (when speaking of His creation). Thus, the coherence theory of truth is in the broadest sense true.

The way in which it is false, the reason it becomes false in nearly all applications, is simple: men make the wrong thing central. Judging truth by its coherence to reality fails because men set the wrong thing as the ultimate truth; they take either an inferior and incomplete truth (rationality or experience or perception) or a lie (Baal, Allah, etc.) as the Ultimate Truth and make the rest of truth cohere to it, leading themselves astray. Or, to put it another way, we make such incomplete truths or actual lies into an Ultimate Reality and make truth correspond to it. God exists (is existentially true) regardless of what I find to cohere to my axiomatic self.

The reason the correspondence theory excels here is that it’s much less susceptible to systemic deception, by God’s grace. While both are vulnerable to axiomatic errors, the coherence theory refuses the correction God gives through other inputs- the senses (including Scripture), innate knowledge, and direct revelation in the Spirit- and continues on regardless, while the correspondence theory, because it desires to correspond to reality, has more impulse to consider the new data. Of course, if the axiom is false, unless the axiom is abandoned (proving it a theoretical, not an actual, axiom, or demonstrating a Divine alteration of the person’s heart, as in conversion), even the correspondence theory demands that the new evidence, however convincing in itself, be abandoned, as the axiom has more evidential weight than the new data in the question of what corresponds to reality.

Some of the difficulty of such definitions should be apparent now. The two definitions of ‘truth’ we’ve examined can be ranked, putting one as more useful, more correct, more widely used than the other, but the remaining definition cannot be discarded entirely. In fact, at a certain point, both definitions converge into being identical (and both, we must note, are invulnerable to reductio ad absurdum, being logically consistent- definitionally, for coherence theory, and by virtue of correspondence to His nature as logic’s standard, for correspondence theory). Even those definitions of truth we discarded very early must be acknowledged to be definitions men used- and thus truly definitions in those uses, though never to be equated to another definition, being, insofar as their definitions differ, different words. Semantics gets very confusing and very complicated very quickly. It’s also incredibly important for communication to be aware of what definitions both sides are using, how they interact, and whether the other person recognizes the semantic situation. So… take care with your words.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. Actually, I am partial to a description of time which includes some compounding (‘Time is the incarnation of logical progression.’) It fits with the rest, though, in terms of the type of philosophical debate which springs up around it. ↩︎
2. They are actually partial reflections of the true simple unity, God. See this article for more on that reflective process. This is why I want to describe time in terms of logic; God, being eternal, is atemporal, and so logic, which is more present in Him (His logic is unified as ours is not), is closer to being entirely simple. ↩︎
3. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Swing (Noun), Definition 5. ↩︎
4. Actually, I’d consider ‘authority’ to be more basic than ‘morality’. That’s a discussion for another context, though. ↩︎
5. Nietzsche fits into the ‘truth is what works’ category as well, actually, but this other element of his thought is distinct enough to warrant mention, even if it’s more his followers’ thought than his own. ↩︎
6. This last statement (the parenthetical one) is a little daring- to relate two concepts I have named ‘simple.’ As I’ve mentioned with time, however, and implied with morality (by making it subsequent to authority in footnote 4), calling these simple is not an absolute assertion; they’re quite close to simple, not necessarily entirely simple. As footnote 2 states, moreover, all these simple concepts are subsequent to His nature. ↩︎