| To most people nowadays, questions like what is truth have little relevance. People have become hamstrung by the work hard play hard ethic: the mortgage isn't going to pay itself; a good education costs an arm and a leg; gas prices are up again ... The truth for most people is represented by those bits of paper with red numbers on them that tumble through your letterbox every month. The Impressionist worries about truth quite a lot, and not just the gas bill. Which is about the only thing he has in common with religious leaders like Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Canterbury who gave a lecture in Melbourne this week. The Archbishop asserts that young people are searching for God, a sense of community, and how to reach out to the needy. How convenient then that these are just what his church purports to deliver. The Impressionist doesn't know what young people are searching for, but suspects rather that they may not be searching at all. Most things in life, like gas bills, find you rather than you searching for them. One of the problems with truth is that lots of people claim sole ownership of it. Like drooling double-glazing salesmen, they tout their wares: blessings, enlightenment, salvation, everlasting bliss (or an equivalent substitute if these are out of stock). And all you have to do is give them money - sorry - donations. Of course, what you actually get is the chance to belong to a community of like-minded adherents and the feelings of well-being that community spirit brings to you. So the concept of truth often gets confused with the concept of community. Is this a deliberate ploy by the nirvana-merchants to increase their constituency by appealing to those who see themselves on the fringes of society? Is it altruism or something else? Popularly held views about what is true are no better. According to a new book, THE LOOMING TOWER Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, 85 per cent of American soldiers said that the 'main mission' was 'to retaliate for Saddam’s role' in the September 11 attacks. More Americans (42 percent) than Pakistanis (41 percent) think the US government, i.e. their own government, carried out the attacks. This shows that truth has nothing whatsoever to do with the opinions of people, however widely held. These represent what the truth isn't. OK, clever-clogs, I hear you say, what is truth, then? How are we to discern the right from the wrong? As the fictional computer Deep Thought said: 'You're not going to like this. No, I mean you're really not going to like this.' The truth is a theory about the world and it can be established only by objective evidence. The American physicist Richard Feynman pointed out that if your theory doesn't agree with the experiment, then your theory is wrong. This makes the truth hard - but not impossible - to determine: you have to collect a lot of evidence and take care not to miss out the bits that don't support your position.
If you find some objective evidence that disagrees with your truth then your truth is wrong.
The difficulty of obtaining evidence and the awkward tendency of facts to contradict most opinions is why evidence is seldom used nowadays. Where such principles are applied - in science and engineering - we have the most successful results: bridges don't fall down; cell phones work; the Archbishop's lecture is successfully relayed around the world by technologies developed on the basis of hard evidence, not divine revelation. If science and engineering were carried on in the same way as religion and politics, we would all be dead. We would, however, be very happy, being in paradise. | 
