What is the Truth?

I think you have misspoke. Pontus Pilate actually said, “What is truth?” and that is altogether a different question. By adding the article, you've merely kicked the can down the road, so let me explain.

Aristotle held that, “ If I say a thing is such and such, and it is, I have spoken the truth.” Correct in its way but facile, so please now imagine a table. All tables have a similar form and function, features that Wittgenstein might call “tableness.” Some tables of course will have more of these features than others, or as he put it, “A robin is more of a bird than an ostrich.” I understand that both have feathers, but think about birds and you'll get what he means.

Language contains only labels, pointing towards certain objects about which we have some consensus. Think about it. Verbs describe actions and nouns are concepts, and dictionaries merely exist to record the current consensus on meaning.

So if you're not sure what a table might be, look in Websters and you'll find a definition, but what does that have to say about truth. As Nietzsche put it, all language is metaphor, its various meanings more or less shared between the people who currently speak it. How close that sharing depends on what noun is in play. We can agree about tables, but what about the abstract concepts like love or justice? Your truth is true just for you? Let's leave Aristotle and his facts, returning instead to Pilate and what is truth?

In the material universe, there can only be probability. As Hume so cleverly asked, “How do we know the Sun will rise tomorrow?” It has such an excellent record of coming up, we can have expectations about tomorrow. That makes for strong probability, but is that the same as truth? The universe could end overnight, and no more Sun tomorrow. Our so-called scientific laws are only mathematical models approximating real world behaviours, eith some more accurate than others. As Box so beautifully put it, “All models are wrong but some are useful.”

The same is true on any empiricism. There are for example facts in history. The French Revolution started in 1789. That is a fact in evidence and clearly true, but what was the meaning of the French Revolution? Now we're inot opinion.

The Greeks believed there were absolutes. Truth, goodness and beauty they called the transcendentals, perfected outside our universe with only types and shadows seen within our world. To understand what this means, I suggest you google Botticelli's Venus Arising and study her eyes close up. A Neo-Platonist, he set out to capture Absolute Beauty, and you will find he got very close, her eyes are drawing you with a sense of home and safety, of peace not as we describe it (the absence of conflict) but more like the Jewish word shalom.

Of course, if Jesus was the Son of God, then Pilate was badly mistaken. God, if He exists at all, must surely exist beyond (before) our universe where there can be no atrophy or decay, or how would He be an absolute God, and such a place, being perfect, would have to feature perfect truth, goodness and beauty. Christ, by coming from there to here, expresses Botticelli's intention, the Absolute coming through the curtain to enter our time limited and decaying world. The, as Jesus pointed out, you would have truth, though expressed as a person and not an idea.

If however there is no God, then there can be no truth, only probability and what we hope are good enough approximations to keep us going, decay and death the only remaining certainties.