Transcendent and transient truths

There is much to be cherished and applied today in the wisdom and the truths that have been handed down to us by our forebears.

In any enduring belief system or faith there are truths that are transcendent and truths that are transient.

The lasting truths transcend circumstance and knowledge.  They are as true today as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, and we can reasonably expect them to persist into the future thousands of years from now.

Transient truths are constructs of their epoch.  They may be held as true for centuries but at some point they begin to clash with new and emerging realities.  Continuing to insist that such truths are transcendent rather than transient undermines an entire faith^[1] and causes us to doubt all.

Human knowledge has advanced miraculously in the millennia since the founding of our great faiths.

More than once the cherished tenets of a faith have come up against the advance of knowledge and lost.  Only the deluded^[2] continue to claim that the Earth is flat or lies at the centre of the Universe.  Religious institutions put up a long and intense struggle in denial, but finally succumbed.  Perhaps a similar process is now occurring in the Evolution versus Creation or Intelligent Design debate?

Avowed transcendent truths have been revealed to have been transient truths only.

The deposing of once transcendent truths will continue as humanity comes to know more and more about Nature and the Universe through reason and science^[3].

But that does not negate the validity and importance of faith and religious experience^[4].  Rather, what it does is to affirm the proper realm of faith, the realm of the “unknowable”^[5] - unknowable in the rational sense.

Literal and uncritical interpretations of our great holy scriptures are not sustainable for many.  They set up an internal conflict between what we know to be true in our hearts and minds, and what is claimed to be true by self-professed true-believers, and the agents of religious institutions.

At any point in time truths that are transient will be seen as transcendent.  We are all creatures of our time limited by the perspectives^[6] then available to us.  So it is not possible to identify the transient truths until they are behind you.

There are also the few thought leaders and the mass of followers.  The thought leaders always manage their messages and relay what they believe can be digested at that time, or what suits their own personal ends.

Sometimes this can be thought of as a parent gradually bringing awareness to their child.  The undiluted truth as the parent believes it to be may be too harsh for the child.  So the truth is softened or dressed up.  Later, a more adult version of the truth may be presented to the then older child.

The same applies at the collective societal level.  The truths that were shared with past generations were softened to what they could cope with.  And just as most children develop and become capable of handling greater complexity and uncertainty, so humanity has over the centuries developed^[7] to be able to absorb more complex and less palatable modalities of the truth.  The societies and people we are today, and the knowledge and possibilities we now have are radically different from those of the times during which our great faiths were founded.

Apart from transcendent and transient truths there have also been countless false or trivial truths over the ages.  False and trivial truths have served the advancement of personal and institutional power^[8].  They are mostly the pedantic and ritualistic truths that cause institutional schisms and sectarian outbursts.

This work does not discard the transcendent truths and ideas that have been passed down to us from our forebears.  Truth in Uncertainty provides a framework for sifting the transcendent from the transient in the context of third millennium humanity.