She's my Mother! She's my Sister! (Truth and Fact)

Every now and again someone asks me if the Bible is "true." That is such a tricky question to answer because "true" is such a vague and un-precise term. Calm down all you empiricist realist fanatics. What I mean is if something is not true that doesn't necessarily mean that it is false. Make sense?

Truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I can read Greek or Roman mythology and walk away claiming that they are great stories but they aren't true. Thousands of years ago someone else would have heard (or read) these stories and said that they were, without a doubt, true. I could say that we have advanced, that we now know much more than we have in the past and are much smarter than to be duped for such silly stories of gods and humanity. Yet if I say this then I have nothing to stand upon when I claim that now we know better, now we know that there is one God (in three persons), etc., etc. Instead I would probably have to rest in a place believing that one thousand years from now we will look back on the stories of Christianity and claim that they are good stories but we now know that they are not "true."

We have some fun little arguments about truth happening today that I think raise the issue even more. There are some (billions) that believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth at one time. We have found bones, eggs, poop, and many other signs of previous dinosaur existence. There are others who argue that the bones, eggs, and poop were placed here maliciously by Satan to trick us into believing that long ago dinosaurs roamed the earth. What is true? Both and neither. Both are looking at "facts," observable evidence of something, and then deriving at a truth - Satan is a tricky S.O.B., or dinosaurs once walked all over our backyards.

There are those who will accept the idea that dinosaurs did exist, but they lived with "man"in the garden of Eden under good terms. This is a very different "truth" that is trying to bring the "truth" of the creation story of the Bible with the "truth" of the existence of dinosaurs.

There are "facts" and there are "truths." Problems arise when we conflate the two and then demand that we be right.

"The earth was created in six days, it is a fact, it says so in the Bible." - no, that is a truth

"God does not exist, there is no evidence, that is a fact." - no, that is a truth

So is the Bible "true." To me it is (although to what level and what degree and in what way is all up for grabs).

To others, it is not.

To some it is a truth that I am going to hell for suggesting such things.
I'm okay with that.