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To: betty boop
In short, I do not believe that "truth is an abstract." I believe Truth is the very foundation of, and plan for Reality itself.

To my mind, Reality is an "abstraction" from Truth, and not the other way around.

That is close to what I am attempting to say and that is what leads me to call Truth an abstract. We can know truth well enough to get along in our everyday lives but do we really know the rest of the story? I see truth to be the ideal, an abstract, and an ideal we can't really know or describe. We simply keep looking as one theory gets replaced by another and some facts turn out to be something else altogether.

All of what you say is true for the practical purpose of logical discussion, for our everyday use, but it is all based on assumptions of what is supposedly apparent.

I see truth as interchangeable with essence and ideal and I posit that we cannot yet know essence, and may never be able to. Therefore, truth is an abstraction.

71 posted on 01/03/2012 4:24:55 PM PST by Mind-numbed Robot
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To: Mind-numbed Robot; Alamo-Girl; A_perfect_lady; grey_whiskers; Matchett-PI; xzins; YHAOS; MHGinTN
That is close to what I am attempting to say and that is what leads me to call Truth an abstract. We can know truth well enough to get along in our everyday lives but do we really know the rest of the story? I see truth to be the ideal, an abstract, and an ideal we can't really know or describe. We simply keep looking as one theory gets replaced by another and some facts turn out to be something else altogether.

I don't see that one scientific theory gets replaced by another, in light of some facts turning out to be something else altogether. For example, Newtonian mechanics is still amazingly fruitful in its "domain." Even though is has been shown to be incomplete by the relativity and quantum theories, those theories did not "replace" it.

When I look at the history of science, what most impresses me is how this multigenerational community of minds (scientists, that is) builds on the theoretical work of its predecessors, right back to the beginning, as it were, in ancient Greece, that amazing historical period in which both natural science and the science of psyche burst onto the world stage for the very first time. One sees a sort of "evolution" from there....

Don't forget, the original atomic theory was proposed by Democritus (ca. 460 BC — ca. 370 BC)....

As I wrote, I think "Reality is an 'abstraction' from Truth, and not the other way around"; and you replied that was close to what you meant by regarding Truth as an "abstract." In one sense, I think that's true: For Truth is a universal; immaterial; timeless. Which definitely means it is not the sort of concrete phenomenon with which human beings ordinarily engage in their practical lives.

But on the other hand, practical daily lives would be impossible to live if the world were not ordered in Truth. Truth is that which does not change; all the phenomenal world is in a state of constant change. But that change is not "random," rather it is constrained by the limits imposed by Truth.

To use religious terms, Truth is the Logos, Alpha to Omega, a/k/a the Word of God, which has been in the world since the Beginning, and will be there in the end, and in all the in-between. The world is what it is because the Logos is what it is. This is what I meant by "reality is an 'abstraction' from Truth, and not the other way around."

As my dearest sister in Christ, Alamo-Girl, has put it (I'm paraphrasing here): What IS is what God has said, His Word (Logos) in the beginning. Because God said it, it is Truth.

In conclusion, to me Truth is the Logos of God, operating in the world — First Cause, to Final Cause, with Immanent Cause "in-between" guiding the evolution of the system from first to last. In short, God IS Truth. "Get rid of God," and you "get rid of" Truth. To put it yet another way, there is no foundation for Truth absent God.

So call me simple-minded! LOLOL! On the other hand, I resonate to Renée Descartes' telling observation that "the idea of God is the prior condition in the human mind for the possibility of any other idea, even that of the ego itself" (as Wolfhart Pannenberg expresses it). Thus, God is THE necessary idea, ontologically and epistemologically, that underpins Reality (if I might put it that way).

Just some thoughts, dear Mind-numbed Robot! I'm so enjoying this discussion! Thank you so very much for your thoughtful and thought-provoking essay/post!

96 posted on 01/05/2012 8:49:23 AM PST by betty boop (We are led to believe a lie when we see with, and not through, the eye. — William Blake)
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