What is Truth?
While interrogating Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilate asked this question somewhat rhetorically before bringing him out to the people who wished to kill him. Pilate admits he found no fault in him that would warrant crucifixion, but to the mob, Pilate’s opinion and bargaining did little to persuade them from their desire for executing Jesus. Seeking to ease the tensions and bring about peace, he allowed them to crucify Jesus. But the question Pilate raised is an important one. What is truth?
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
— Edmund Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons
I remembered myself at a young age being enamored with dinosaurs, but unable to reconcile the scientific truth from my religious truth I had been taught. I remember the answer my father gave me when I asked him why there were no dinosaurs in the creation story of the Bible. His response for me was to “read the scriptures and pray about it” while being somewhat dismissive as he washed the dishes. I was a bit annoyed with his non-answer, but decided I would read and pray about it. I never received an answer from the divine. That simple question would stir in my mind for years and would be accompanied by many more questions as I pondered over the reality and truth I had been brought up in. For me, creating a solid understanding of my truth and my reality wasn’t high on my priority list as the only one that this unmooring affected was myself.
When my son was born, these doubts in my faith and these questions I held for so long bothered me more than it ever did before. I remembered the confusion I had as a kid. I remembered the questions I had that remained unanswered because my parents refused to question their own truth. I did not want my son to experience the same thing. When he was born, it kicked off a time of soul-searching for me. What can I teach my son so that he grows up better than me? What do I actually know and what do I believe? I’m definitely not an arbiter of truth. There are many questions that I have that are still unanswered. Even so, my mind rests easier now that my ideologies no longer clash with one another as they did for so long. With all that said, what is truth?
Opposition of Truth
In 2025, I had a daily commute to work on a train that took me from Tukwila to the heart of Seattle. I spent that time reading and pondering about my faith, beliefs, values, and ideas. Even wrote some of the earlier entries of this blog while on that commute. From my readings, if I were to recommend any book during that year, it would be Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. No book has shaped me more into who I am today than that book. He foretells the calamities that we are facing today and will face in the future if we continue down the path we find ourselves in. A snippet of his book recently made headlines as he predicted back in 1995 what we see today.
He writes:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting — profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
That passage should ring true to you. There is a disinformation war happening around us today. The dumbing down of America is real. Our current political leaders, the Trump Administration especially, is dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, appointing unqualified politicians in positions overseeing public health, cutting funding for many scientific pursuits, and spreading misinformation about so many topics it’s difficult to keep track. Vaccines, autism, climate change, renewable energies, and the use of AI videos are just some of the issues raised by this administration’s disinformation campaign.
Many organizations like the Heritage Foundation, The Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, and the Discovery Institute enable and fund science denialism and grifters to support their religious views. They invest significant resources in convincing people (especially children) that a false scientific controversy exists. That has downstream effects on scientific literacy and on how people evaluate evidence more broadly.
On another front, the way we obtain information is changing as well. I believe AI will be beneficial for us in the long run. It’s great at finding sources and deep-diving into topics. It can have the world’s knowledge (and all its ignorance) ready in a matter of seconds. It can also hallucinate and say things that are not true. As with any tool, one needs to know how to use it and be aware of how it could be used for harm.
If I were to make an overarching declaration about the political disinformation, institutional science denialism, and misuse of AI, it would be to distrust and verify. It is more important than ever to teach our children how to discern truth from the false information they will encounter day to day.
Finding Truth
How do we know what is true and what is not? That’s a question that has plagued the minds of philosophers for ages. As I said before, I’m no arbiter of truth by any stretch of the imagination. For me, I think the best way for us to discover truth is by ruling out the falsehoods and misconceptions. Be a skeptic. Through reasoning and deduction, we can come pretty close to a truth that supports the reality we find ourselves in. Sagan thought so as well. In chapter twelve of The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan outlines a tool kit for skeptical thinking. What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and — especially important — to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument.
He called these tools the “Baloney Detection Kit” (emphasis added):
- Wherever possible, get independent confirmation of the “facts.”
- Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
- Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most there are experts.
- Spin more than one hypothesis — If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
- Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
- If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
- Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
- Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
Using these tools, we can weed out what is false and nurture what is true. Does that mean that all we know from science is unchangeable truth? No, but sometimes it’s the best explanation that we have. A quote by George E.P. Box, a British statistician, comes to mind: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
But that’s the beauty of the scientific method. Science isn’t afraid of being wrong. Being wrong is one step closer to fine tuning our models to best replicate our reality and explain what was once unexplainable.
"The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science."
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, Ch. 1: “The Most Precious Thing”
I definitely don’t have all the answers. I’m not sure I ever will. And honestly, I think that’s okay. What I want for my son isn’t certainty — it’s curiosity. The ability to sit with a hard question without flinching, to follow evidence where it leads even when it’s uncomfortable, and to hold his beliefs loosely enough that truth can find its way in.
So what is truth? We don’t really know and most likely never will. But like a compass pointing the way through a thick fog, the scientific method can help us create models that get us closer to the truth. Sometimes our models are proven wrong and are discarded. Sometimes our models work and we don’t know exactly how. Sometimes our models are correct and lead us to new discoveries and even more daunting questions. But we must strive to be curious and always attempt to build better compasses so that we may be ever so slightly closer to the light of truth and not fade into the darkness of ignorance.