Leo Severino - Going Deeper: A Reasoned Exploration of God and Truth

LEO SEVERINO

A Reasoned Exploration
of God and Truth

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover photo:
Leaf by Remo Kottonau
gettyimages

Cover design by Leo Severino and Enrique J. Aguilar

2017 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-054-7 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-790-7 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2016941423
Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated primarily to my best friendmy lovely wife, Jacque Severino, the source and inspiration for so much that is true and beautiful in my life. Thank you princess. Also to my children, Mina and Lukasif they can someday grasp and live the truths set forth in the following pages, this books purpose will have been fulfilled.

I would also like to thank:

Most special thanks to Rod Barr who gave me the writing voice I never knew I had. So much of this work is yours as much as it is mine. I am deeply indebted.

CHAPTER 1

There Is No Truth

Back in my days as a budding philosopher, I spent a lot of time pondering the idea of truth. And after years of exposure to countless and varied beliefs and philosophies, I became thoroughly convinced. There is no such thing .

How could there possibly be such a thing as truth, I thought, when everyone who claims some truth seems to claim something different? Or when science changes its mind about something we had, for generations, held to be true? Or when something is absolutely, irrefutably true for you , but not for me ? Brilliant minds seem constantly to disagree about some of the most basic concepts. I could find no way to disprove, let alone avoid, the notion that there is notnor could there ever besuch a thing as truth. I found the concept nave and ill-fit for modern philosophical minds.

Then one day, I realized that I was the nave one.

There was something blatantly wrong with my whole approach. I discovered a flaw in my reasoning, an insight that would change the course of my entire way of thinking. Something so simple and obvious that somehow I, and countless others who thought the way I did, had failed to notice. It was the following:

As soon as anyone claims there is no truth, he is really saying:

it is TRUE that there is no truth.

Now, Im a logical person, so this hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized that the statement There is no truth is itself a truth claim. To believe it, is to disprove it. Its like saying, Im 100 percent certain that I cant be 100 percent certain about anything.

Can you see the problem? Can you see how that statement contradicts itself? It became clear to me that, logically speaking, the statement is nonsense and cannot possibly be true. And after a few days unraveling my false notions about the reality of truth , what struck me next was this: There are only two possibilities. Either there is truth or there is no truth. If we disprove one, we have proven the other. Logic infallibly leads us to this conclusion: For any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is true.

Because the statement It is true that there is no truth cannot logically be true, the only conclusion to be drawn is that there is truth. Put more forcefully, I came to the conclusion that, despite anything claiming otherwise, there must be truth. There is no other reasonable option.

Now, I had no idea what that truth might be. In fact I wasnt concerned yet with the content of truthhow truth behaved, or what truth consisted of, or what truth meant. All I knew was that, logically, truth must exist.

So whats the big deal?

Well, it turned out to be a very, very big deal, at least for me. It turned out to be the doorway through which I came to discover what truly brilliant minds have been saying for thousands and thousands of years.

And it changed my life.

AN OBJECT FILLED WITH
WHITE POWDER

I began noticing things about the concept of truthsimple, everyday things I had never noticed before.

Allow me to illustrate. Imagine youre eating at a restaurant, and on the table is a narrow glass container filled with a white powdery substance, topped with a perforated metal cap. The waitress sets a plate of French fries in front of you. Instinctively, you reach for the container, turn it upside down, and start shaking the white substance all over your fries.

Of course there are many kinds of white, powdery substances in the world. Sugar, flour, cocaine, anthraxthe list goes on and on. And that container could theoretically be filled with any of a host of similar substances, each of which having radically different results if sprinkled on food. Nonetheless, you feel confident that when you shake that object, salt will sprinkle onto your fries. And you do it unconsciously and without hesitation. Why?

Because we are all, at every moment, acting upon some claim of truth. In fact, we cant possibly avoid acting upon claims of truth. In this case, when we shake that container over our plate of fries, we are acting upon the presumption that it is true that the shaker contains salt, not poison . A reasonable supposition, no doubt, but an assertion concerning truth nonetheless. When we sit down in a chair, we are acting upon the presumption that it is true that the chair can support our weight without breaking . With every single thing we willingly do, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are acting upon some claim of truth.

Now, the claim itself may be right or wrong. In fact, I once sat on a chair that instantly collapsed. But I believed the chair could hold my weightand in that belief, my intellect was making an effort to grasp reality. Indeed, a good working definition of truth is that which corresponds to reality . When your thoughts line up with reality, you have grasped truth.

TRUTH is the equivalence of thought to reality. In other words, when your thoughts match reality, youve arrived at the truth.

In the grand scheme, our truth claims about salt shakers and chairs are pretty trivial. When I made my mistaken truth claim about the chair, for example, all that resulted was some shattered wood and a bruised ego.

But some claims of truth are far more significant. Some truth claims go to the very core of our life and our being. Those were the claims of truth I very much wanted to study. Those were the things about which I did not want to be mistaken.

So my next inquiry was this: Is it possible for us to identify something self-evident, something irrefutable, something purely logical that can help us plumb those deeper, more significant truths? Is it possible to take all of our preconceived notionsour beliefs, our religion, our science, our cultural historiesand put them aside for a moment? Is there a way to arrive logically, rationally, at some core of truth that everyone should be able to agree upon?

I discovered that the answer is yes.

Heres how.

CHAPTER 1 RECAP

At the end of each chapter, youll find a very brief summary of that chapters main ideas. The purpose of each summary is to clarify some of the more complicated concepts while supplying an encapsulated form of the concepts themselves.

Linked together, all these recaps will form one consistent logical train of thought. I highly recommend that you take some time with each recap until the logic becomes crystal clear before moving on to the next chapter.