Post-Truth Era: Facts vs. Belief

Post-Truth: Facts and Faithfulness

The Post-Truth Era

• Stephen Colbert, on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," played a conservative talk-show host and popularized the term "truthiness" to describe something that seems like truth.
• Wikipedia defined "truthiness" as truth known intuitively without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
• Oxford Dictionaries named "post-truth" the "international word of the year" in 2016.
• "Post-truth" relates to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
• "Post" means "after" as in "post-traumatic stress disorder" or the “post-Christian era,” in which Christianity can no longer be assumed as a touchstone for adjudicating political controversies.
• In a post-truth world, there are no authorities whose truth claims are broadly acknowledged to be true by general consensus.
• Various sources of information are now viewed with suspicion, including politicians, pastors, parents, professors, and even science.
• Truth is now manipulated by those with the power to make others believe something is true for their own interests.
• Cynicism asserts there is a truth, but suspicion exists towards anyone's claim to truth.
• Skepticism proposes that discovering truth is impossible due to limited perspectives and brain capacity.
• Relativism suggests that there is no truth that is true for everybody.
• Due to confusion and ambiguity, people are tempted to trust their guts, intuitions, emotions, and personal preferences rather than outside authorities.

Truth Matters

• Students today are worldly-wise, street-smart, and have imbibed cultural suspicion about truth.
• Students harbor doubts about truth, but the truth still matters to them.
• Attending university is an investment based on the belief that it will improve life.
• University requires sacrifices of time, money, and energy.
• People need the truth in order to negotiate challenges in areas like climate, economics, health, politics, justice, and peace.

The Truth Today

• The measure of truth today is what is real, which are the facts.
• The truth is oriented toward what is the case, or the naming of what is the case.
• Truth in this sense is distinguished from "what is not the case."
• What is not true can manifest as fantasy, error, or lying.

Truth as Faithfulness

• The Old English word "troth" evolved into the modern word "truth."
• Troth means faithfulness, as in pledging one's troth on a wedding day or having a true friend.
• Truth as faithfulness does not mean the same thing as truth as fact.
• Being true means more than just telling the truth.
• Truth as faithfulness is oriented toward what is not the case, toward the future, toward promise.
• The modern eclipsing of truth as faithfulness in favor of truth as fact is behind the current crisis in truth.
• A richer view of truth is needed, in which truth as fact is a sub-category of truth as faithfulness.

Christian Truth

• Modern science is taken as the primary authority on matters of truth.
• Everything else is suspect, which leads to scientists being the priests of the modern age.
• Science replaces myths, traditions, and old authorities; so truth as fact replaces truth as faithfulness.
• The Christian community aspires to recognize the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as central truth, which seemingly conflicts with the modern emphasis on scientifically provable truth.
• Christians have been influenced by the modern age in a way that affects the way that they understand Christianity.
• Christians tend to understand the truth of Christianity on the model of truths of fact rather than as the truth of faithfulness.

Conclusion

• The current crisis in truth is popularly referred to as "the post-truth" era.
• Despite the crisis in truth, truth still matters personally and collectively.
• Present day views on truth as facts are contrasted with a richer view on truth as faithfulness.
• The latter should be of central concern to Christians.

Alternative Facts: Worldviews and Truth

Alternative Facts

• Sean Spicer bragged that Donald Trumps inauguration crowd was the largest ever
• Kellyanne Conway said Sean Spicer was giving alternative facts
• Each side of political spectrum spinning evidence to refute one another
• Truth dissolved into Trumps truth versus the medias truth

Non-Teleological Science

• There are always facts, right? Trump is lying for political purposes
• Is not CNN right?
• For most of the "educated world" that understand how to the scientific method works, there are compelling reasons why things are considered true and others false
• Scientists are making stuff up, facts are the facts, right? This thinking is neither universal or does it come from nowhere.

Distrusting Truth

• An issue with the claim that facts are the part of truth is that with all the “ethical” problems as well
• The people from these area attracted to the alternative facts are different from them, they have been betrayed by the facts so they should not be faithful

Christian Worldview and Alternative Facts?

• Many people use christian worldview
• The way people see things affect how people see themselves, and this affect the world
• Under “creation” comes the biology courses, sociology courses, and theology classes
• To understand reality as creation, to live within the Christian glory its to do all from gods gives and understand that the world id produced through random events
• World view should be understood In a broad way when people are spiritua, and ethical and bodily

Worldviews vs. Ideologies

• "idealogoy" contains the the word “idea;”, so here my prior idea about keeps from the truth
• The concern over "alternative facts" that our worldviews keep us from seeing the what is the prejudice
• Wanting to think as and ideology,

Yours Truly: Truth and the Christian University

Knowing and knowing about

• The goal of the University is for people to now the knowledge is to what we must know to pursue the truth from things
• The point is for students to now things that are true
• We know that knowledge means for knowledge ot the truth
• The university both in its research and teaching capaticy is in the know business

Not all facts are true

• Its the Jews that must be put onto the cartle of cars
• Many are talking about this fact with a perversioned heartless enfficienty
• To call the facts, to call such act

Taking truth personally

• Wrote this letter sent
• When people had the time to spend and right out to the to do and send the letter over
• When people pledge its done with that is all with them
• Have the heart with yourself and all to help make the gods will

Imagination, facts, and fantasy

• All promises requires fathfullnes to work out and what its going make and what things going change
• Have the same goals