What is the Truth?
So the question has been asked for centuries, indeed, from the time man developed the sense of wonder of the surroundings he has been thrust into. The rise of civilizations, and there inevitable fall, has always been governed about the search for truth, and its spread to others. For the Ancient Egyptians, the truth is the afterlife, for the Hindu's of India, the truth is a cycle of birth and re-birth, for the Muslims, the truth is to follow Allah, for Christians, the truth is to return to union with God in heaven.
In more secular terms, the rise of the nation-state in the 19th century brought with it new truths. For the United States of America, it was a belief in their manifest destiny to rule the world through the scepter of democracy, for the British Empire, the truth was to conquer the world for riches and for country.
The rise of the sciences from the time of Galileo challenged the monopolistic concept of what the truth is as propagated by the Catholic Church. From that moment on, the Catholic Church could no longer impose its version of the truth. Truth now became a science endeavour - detached from organized religion and based solely on the analysis of the universe.
In the realm of philosophy, three thinkers have made significant influence on the study of the truth. Kant, Nietsche and Habermas.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a Prussian intellectual who lived his life almost exclusively on the Prussian City of Konigsberg. For Kant, man can never acquire the truth, for truth is only the invention of the human mind. The real truth he called noumenon is something that is beyond the grasp of human intellect. What can certainly be ascertained by man is the truth through the phenomenon, of the things surrounding man. This is incidentally also the realm of science, as science studies the truth based on the things around the universe.
Friedrich von Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a great German philosopher who famously asserted that "God is dead." For Nietzsche, the truth is something man can never come to, what he has instead is just a mere interpretation of what he understands of the things around him. In other words, man creates the truth by his interpretation of things around him.
Finally, we have Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929), who like Nietzsche, is a German. For Habermas, the truth is not merely the confluence of what is in reality and what is in the mind of man - rather, the truth is a "communicative action" brought about by the "meeting of horizons" among peoples. In other words, the truth is what man, in dynamic interaction with his fellowmen, agrees to be the truth.
The great strides in science and technology over the past 100 years still makes the ideas of Kant, Nietzsche and Habermas on the concept of the truth still relevant. Indeed, it has been proven time and time again is that the truth, even in the sciences, changes as time moves on. The Newtonian physics was the gold standard until Einstein's Theory of Relativity, although it was never completely superseded. Nowadays, Stephen Hawking's search for a Theory of Everything will either consolidate the Standard Model of Physics, Quantum Theory and Theory of Relativity or completely bring about a new paradigm shift.
What is clear is that the truth that religions offer is becoming less and less relevant, reasonable and plausible. Science is becoming the telescope upon which man and his future is increasingly being viewed from. But as Kant would say, it is just the phenomenon, a knowledge gleaned by man through the invention of the instrument of physics and the other sciences. Nevertheless, maybe Kant missed the sublimity that nature offers in that in the study of the phenomenon, we will finally glimpse the face of the noumenon.
Nietzsche would fall along Kant in this, as both believe that the truth searched by science is indeed a truth based on things around him. Even Habermas would be right, after all, the search for the truth, even one based on hard science as physics is till a collaboration between men, although maybe initiated by individual men, it is increasingly becoming clear that the search for the ultimate meaning of life and of the universe, as manifested by the multinational and global effort that was brought into the building and design of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, is a "communicative" endeavor in the light of Habermas thought.
For all its worth, the truth is indeed what man says it is.
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