A particularly careless thing to do

The eternity of truth is inherent in it: all truths—not a few grand ones—are equally eternal. I am sorry that the word eternal should necessarily have an unction which prejudices dry minds against it, and leads fools to use it without understanding. This unction is not rhetorical, because the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its sublimity. Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

Even during my lifetime, our concept of truth seems to have changed. It has become less conspicuous as an ideal underpinning developed societies. Yet within living memory, truth could still be described as one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Today it isn’t so easy to treat truth as an imperishable ideal. There is also a sense in which the social status of truth has declined.

In Santayana's day, Christian culture could be said to embrace a view of ultimate reality where any human viewpoint rarely or never attains the ideal of eternal truth. Only God understands eternal truth. That gave us a secure ideal for truth – something we may approach forever but never attain.

It follows that any human view of reality may be improved on the endless journey towards the ideal of eternal truth. This in turn gives us an ideal of honesty in the sense that we may honestly strive towards the ideal of eternal truth while accepting that any point on that journey may be improved, however fond of older truths we may be.

Of course all this is subject to the numerous failings and dishonesties of human life. Leaving that aside and acknowledging the ineradicable nature of human dishonesty, eternal truth as an ideal has enormous advantages. It takes it away from the human arena - something a secular culture cannot reliably achieve. This may be familiar secular problem, but it has become far more serious over the past century and even worse in recent decades.

If truth is not an eternal ideal known only to God, then the foundations of truth and the search for better truths become shaky and more easily manipulated. As the social status of Christianity declines so does the social status of truth. Not something secular society anticipated.

This is not to claim that the foundations of truth were solid under the care of Christian culture – they were not. Yet the ideal of eternal truth was secure in its association with the deity and now it is not. This has allowed all manner of genies to emerge from all manner of bottles.

The baby we are throwing out with the Christian bathwater is not only the ideal of eternal truth but the corresponding significance of honesty. It is always honest to pursue a better understanding of eternal truth, however imperfect that understanding may be. Yet without eternal truth as an ideal we have no corresponding ideal against which honesty may be judged.

Unfortunately there is more, because the ideal of eternal truth in a Christian society also has a moral element – the search for truth is the search for God’s truth. Perhaps not something we should emphasise too strongly but the moral aspect is not insignificant. Truth is associated with the deity and the search for it is a moral search. This does allow us to suggest that as Christianity has declined so has this moral aspect of truth. That makes three babies thrown out with one lot of bathwater - a particularly careless thing to have done.