About truetruth.one

Welcome to truetruth.one! If you care for

• the deep structure of the world;
• for how to live a good life;
• and for enjoying beauty;
• and for how all these things hang together;

then this website is for you.

What the heck is ‚true truth‘?

The concern of this website is ‚true truth‘. This term is borrowed from the late Christian apologist Francis A. Schaeffer, one of my intellectual heroes.

Of course, it is a truism that truth must be true.

Let’s take a different angle. Suppose what many medieval (and many contemporary) philosophers held is true: namely that all things that exist have the four so-called ‚transcendentals‘:

• Being
• Truth
• Goodness
• Beauty.

Being is simply existence, or call it ‚reality‘. Truth is what can be said and thought about these existing things; said and thought in such a way that it corresponds to reality.

Goodness is the value of the things (we usually make a distinction in moral and non-moral goodness, but that is unimportant here), which of course strictly depends on the way the things are (being), which in turn we express in true sentences about them (truth).

Beauty, finally, might be paraphrased as ‚experienced goodness‘. The beauty of a thing thus depends on its goodness, which in turn depends on its truth, which depends on its being.

Truth, hence, means essentially ‚true propositions (sentences)‘. But in the light of above framework, this leaves out a lot: the underlying reality, as well as the supervening goodness and beauty. ‚True truth‘, by contrast, seeks to incorporate all four transcendentals.

Let me add three more points to make clear what is meant by ‚true truth‘:

1. True truth is distinct from mere system-related truth in that it proves itself true in the roughness of reality. For example, New Agers believe their claims and impressions to be true, and they often form a coherent picture, but it is doubtful that they pass the test of real, rough, everyday life. This is roughly the sense in which Schaeffer used the term, and it corresponds to both being and goodness.
2. True truth satisfies our sense of meaning and beauty. We have an incurable longing for meaning and beauty. True truth need not only explain why this is so (truth), but also help build a bridge to make sense of them (goodness and beauty). Literature, films and other works of art are of great help to grasp that which partly (meaning) or fully (beauty) defies propositional analysis.

About me

I am a philosopher and scientist (biology and chemistry). More importantly, I am a Christian. I believe in the one who called himself „the truth, the life and the way“ (John 14:6).

You can find out more about my work