What is real? What is truth?

One of the things I remember from my intro to philosophy class in college was the discussion about what was real. I think what is real is changing today. For the last several hundred years, real has been something you could isolate scientifically. Reality was defined by objects and existence in a very physical sense. This understanding of real was strongly rooted in the rational mind, something that was highly prized and highly regarded. Immanuel Kant struggled with those things that were beyond reason alone, things like beauty.

I think that things are changing. I think that today what is real as a much more personal nature to it. What is real is not something to be defined by the scientist or the “impartial objective” third party. I believe that reality has instead become intensely personal. This is not to say that there is not an objective component to it, but that reality is ultimated defined by the each individual. This comes from the realization that an “impartial objective” individual does not exist. Each person is forced to filter the world through their own lenses, their own sense of what is what. We cannot step outside of who we are, where we are, and the forces that have shaped our lives to this point in time.

Now, I am aware that I am walking dangerously near the looming chasm of relativism. I am aware that the removal of objective truth in favor of subjective truth is very intimidating. At the same time I think this understanding of truth and reality can be very freeing. Consider the Eucharist, Holy Communion. A great many philosophers struggled to explain how simple bread and wine can also be the body and blood of Jesus Christ. At the heart of this struggle is the fact that according to “objective reality,” the bread and wine appear unchanged. I believe that part of the mystery of Communion is how these simply items of bread and wine, or grape juice in my case, become the very real body and blood of Jesus. To try and come up a simple scientific explanation insults our faith. To believe that everything that occurs in this world is observable, understandable, and can be reduced to things our basic senses and limited intellect can comprehend seems to elevate ourselves to the level of gods.

I do not think we should simply throw out all scientific knowledge, storm the libraries of the world with torches and reduce all that we know to ashes and dust, but I do think we need to realize and appreciate that we are not to be limited by what we can know scientifically, or to think that truth and reality are confined to its bounds. Instead we need to appreciate how our faith and ours minds can take us beyond what is “objectively” real to find something that is intimately, personally, real. I believe that we are going to find God in that sort of real, and so I look at this change as a way that we can begin to develop relationships with God that are passionate and real for each of us.