How do you know something is true?

Common sense. All common sense has to do is show what makes most sense with our limited understanding. Do we stop saying a duck is a duck simply because it might be a cow? No. Do we act like we cant know anything at all if we cant prove a duck is a duck using pure logic? No. As best we can tell a duck is a duck. And so best we can tell, the truth is that a duck is a duck, and based on all tentative truths we perceive, we conclude truth itself exists. Again, based on common sense. Of course there's different kinds of truths and each has a different approach, morality, ethics, science, etc

So I honestly would have to read a tad more, but it is interesting you say you don’t believe in truth? I’m not sure I agree if you mean for certain. I could see things where seeing something in society as true is hard to come by. An empirical example when we try to understand issues in society is that causation is hard to come by (Campbell & Stanley 1963). There are steps to help with this though. I guess my other question is there are different philosophical approaches. How do you identify which is the right one? Or do you use a mixture of different groups?

Is this like a pragmatic approach? And what may happen if people disagree? What happens in society can be complex and we as humans have been shown to be wrong at times. At one point we thought the earth was the middle of the universe. I do like the last part though where you said that there could be different truths. And I’m not trying to be a stickler lol! The way I think and the way I have been trained to think as a researcher is just complex it is hard to narrow a lot of stuff down lol!

Truth, Law, and the Relational Foundations of Reality

Modern debates about truth often collapse into a stale dichotomy: either truth is absolute or truth is relative. But both of these categories can obscure something deeper. When someone insists that “truth is relative,” they often mean that context matters, or that human beings are too limited to grasp universal principles with complete clarity. But to say “truth is relative” as an absolute claim is self-defeating—“relative” is itself a relative term. What people are usually reaching for is something subtler: truth is relational, and whether or not truth is ‘relative’, it’s not arbitrary.

1. Truth: Objective, but Not Mechanical

Across philosophical traditions—from Plato’s “Form of the Good,” to Aquinas’s understanding of truth as “adequatio rei et intellectus,” to the Orthodox vision of Truth as a Person (Christ)—truth is not a human invention. It is something real, grounded in the structure of being itself.

Perhaps this grounding is ultimately God. Perhaps it is some deeper order of reality that even God expresses rather than invents. We may not know the metaphysical foundation with certainty, but the intuition is nearly universal: truth is not up to us.

Take morality. Killing innocent people is wrong. Yes, there may be tragedies—self-defense, war, protecting others—but these exceptions do not make the rule arbitrary. They confirm the rule by showing that human judgment must discern why an act is taken. Exceptions still point back to a deeper, non-negotiable principle: life is sacred.

Human whims do not define moral truth. Truth can be hard to know, but that doesn’t make it subjective.

2. The Relational Dimension of Truth

When people say “truth is relative,” what they often mean is:

Truth interacts with human life through relationship, not through abstraction.

Classical virtue ethics (Aristotle), Confucian relational ethics, and Christian covenantal thought all say the same thing:

morality is discovered in how we live with one another.

In the Christian frame, if truth is rooted in God, then it is also rooted in communion—because God is communion. Truth unfolds through:

bonds between parents and children

commitments between citizens

promises in marriage

friendships and communities

covenants between humans and God

This isn’t relativism. It’s relational truth—truth expressed through love, mutual responsibility, context, and discernment. Orthodoxy often frames this as synergy: truth becomes real in us through cooperation with divine love.

To the extent that truth “varies,” it does so because situations differ, not because truth changes.

Wisdom is applying stable truths to unstable realities.

3. The Curse of the Law: When Rules Replace Relationship

This leads to the paradox: we need laws, but laws alone can never give us truth.

Every society needs structure. Laws restrain evil, protect the vulnerable, and keep chaos at bay. But laws are also blunt instruments. They see actions, not motives; categories, not persons.

Even good laws can wound:

Welfare may feed the hungry and trap them in dependency.

Strict sentencing may protect society and destroy second chances.

Education standards may enforce excellence and suffocate creativity.

Laws create order, but they cannot create justice.

This is the curse of the law:

It treats life as a set of generalities, while real life is lived in particularities.

Law can tell you what to do, but not why.

Law can restrain the hand, but not heal the heart.

Law can regulate behavior, but not cultivate virtue.

This echoes Paul’s lament in the New Testament: law reveals sin but cannot cure it. And it matches modern psychology: rules can shape conduct, but only love transforms the inner self.

4. Why Pure “Rule-Based Truth” Fails

A legalistic world becomes cruel, mechanical, and blind.

A relativistic world becomes incoherent and chaotic.

The answer is neither rigid absolutism nor anything-goes relativism.

Truth must be:

objective in its foundation

relational in its expression

discerned through wisdom, not merely enforced through rules

This is why even the best laws must leave room for:

compassion

discretion

interpretation

mercy

human judgment

growth and amendment

Law provides the scaffolding; love is the architect.

5. Love Makes Law Just

In moral philosophy, this is the difference between:

Kant’s duty without emotion

Aristotle’s virtue through practical wisdom

Jesus’s “law fulfilled in love”

Modern psychology’s emphasis on empathy

NDE insights of moral life-review guided by compassion

When truth becomes relational—rooted in love rather than mere regulation—the moral life becomes what it was meant to be: an encounter with the image of God in every person.

Thus, the deepest truth is neither relative nor rigidly absolute.

It is living truth, discovered in relationship, grounded in a reality that transcends us, expressed through conscience, wisdom, and compassion.

We need laws. But only love can make law just and give truth its meaning and foundation.

And only relational truth—truth grounded in the sacredness of persons—can make human life humane.

https://www.debatecraft.com/forum/c/religion/posts/10b/truth-law-and-the-relational-foundations-of-reality

How well our internal beliefs correspond to external facts of the world is truth. Truth is the bridge between our mind and reality.

I want to thank you for your reply. It was well thought out and I feel I have to respond because I come from a very different background but can see some similarities and some differences. One of the things you mentioned was how it seems God can ground truth? What makes you say that? I myself honestly would love to believe in God, but how do we know he is real and how does this affect truth? Like from my lens empiricists often define truth as “the exact conformity between a mental judgment and external reality, established strictly through sensory observation, testing, and scientific experiment” (Webster). I use to be a real strong Christian but over time as I went through being a PhD student in research and statistics, observing this through this lens is difficult when seeing people in society with phenomenon we can measure (I really still say I’m Christian due to Pascal’s wager, but the complexity of showing if this is true creates an interesting question). I also ask this because there were a lot of philosophers who were atheist or more agnostic in faith.

Laws

So I actually have a lot of agreement here. A lot of what you show can be seen empirically such as laws may deter stuff, but we can see how home life can affect how a decent amount of people become later in life. Research shows that a lot of individuals in prison had rough home life’s, repeat negative cycles from family members, and developed a low IQ through having a negative home life. Also a side note you mentioned that truth is expressed through wisdom and many other things. Physiologist and phenomenological researchers such as sternburg often note wisdom depends on culture and environment. So what do you mean by this in your NDE section. Ultimately thank you for this reply. I honestly want to read a lot more on this so if you have some books to suggests I would be happy to read lol! A lot of this I am clueless about so I can only comment on things I have some basis to comment on lol!

I had to look up the concept you were talking about lol! Do you think the trielma means that knowledge is impossible, or only that our justifications are never ultimately certain? As a researcher in behavior science I honestly would rarely say that I know something to for sure be considered true because it is hard to prove something for certain and one can make the case that hardly anything fits this criteria. Thanks for your reply.

Intellectual Primates on board computer assess sensory input and compares with acquired and stored data...Collectively such data can be loosely regarded as either fact or non-fact, though this would obviously depend upon the definitive or abstract nature of the data and also thinking primates conditioned responses relative to acquired and stored data.

Of course, data is solely reliant upon the above processes and processing units and all data is contained therein...Though it may be recorded...Even so, recorded data is impotent unless it is processed accordingly.

Nonetheless, primate inspired material evolution must rely upon a certain level of factual knowledge, otherwise we would never have invented the wheel and continued to develop it.

Remembering that everything is an internal simulation based upon the assumption that sensory input is directly relative to an external reality...Collective agreement would seem to confirm this...Though agreement, is only based upon the notion of separate interactive units.

"A" is a truth.

I know A is true if -A is false.

"A" is an internally simulated symbolic representation of an internal simulation...As is -A.

As such both are internally accurate, and therefore validation enough within the context of the individual data processing unit.

True and false are internally simulated symbolic representations of internally derived notions of truth and falsehood...Neither of which can be proven to be relative to a provable externality.

Check out the book ‘evidence for the afterlife’ by Dr Jeffrey long. It includes, among other things…

Objective though not fool proof studies on out of body experiences. More than one scientific study has concluded that when out of body experiences occur, they are almost always ‘accurate or at least consistent with reality’. sometimes the description of what happened while the person was dead, couldn’t have been known to them, or at least the things described are consistent with what happened. if someone just guesses what happens out of their body, they are almost always off… it’s actually very hard to guess accurately. there are lots of case studies, like the pam reynolds case, or random examples like seeing a pair of shoes on the window ledge of another room in the hospital. plus, there’s the AWARE study, where one person had auditory experience while dead, and another person had a description of the operation that was consistent with reality. as is often said, all it takes is one black swan to prove that black swans exist.., if anyone is describing something impossible to know, that’s evidence for out of body experiences being accurate, and evidence of the afterlife by extension. One or two anecdotes dont mean much, but repeated anecdotes become a trend. Even if a skeptic might claim its merely anecdotal and not empirical, its still hard to ignore repeated anecdotes especially those under scientific observation

Evidence of people who were blind seeing for the first time during their experience. They struggle to come to grips with their experience as would a new born. These have been observed as well under scientific conditions

Communication on the other side is almost always telepathic. If this was just hallucination, why don’t folks experience verbal and other forms of communication? I dont know how a skeptic could explain this away, i dont know other ways to interpret this.

Earth beings met on the other side r almost always dead relatives. If this was just hallucination why r not they seeing living relatives or living non relatives or dead non relatives a lot more? i understand there might be something special about family and the associations with the deceased, but this is still more evidence than not evidence. you would think people would be hallucinating someone like taylor swift a lot more.

On basic philosophy, think about what people are experiencing: coherent and elaborate afterlife stories, that are more real than their earthly lives and they have no doubt about with no fear of death, and the common themes like light beings, life reviews, tunnels, deceased loved ones, God etc. Drugs dreams and other hallucinations don’t cause these elaborate afterlife stories with those common themes anywhere else. Why would dying out of all possibilities cause all this? if evolution or natural selection could explain it, that’d be one thing, but as far as i can tell those dont explain it.

what we end up with, is evidence so plain as day staring us in the face yet some skeptics pretend there’s not even evidence for the afterlife to begin with

https://www.debatecraft.com/forum/c/religion/posts/33/peer-reviewed-science-of-people-who-are-born-blind-can-see-during-near-death-experiences

Sight to the blind under scientific conditions

https://www.debatecraft.com/forum/c/religion/posts/1k/descriptions-of-the-protocols-used-in-peer-reviewed-studies-of-veridical-out-of-body-experiences--and-whether-these-prove-the-experiences-are-real

Out of body experiences under scientific conditions

Evidence of the afterlife | Forum | DebateCraft https://share.google/BWnGO3YOqA68KkX2p

If “A” = It is raining, then “-A” = It is not raining.

If it is raining then -A is false.

I can see how it is only relative to each other and not the “provable externality” you say because I would first have to know which one is either true or false to know the other statement, so we’re still at the beginning.

How do I know: If A, then -A is false? I didn’t answer that question.

so my initial answer was lazy 😢

SergeantLynch wrote:

"A" is an internally simulated symbolic representation of an internal simulation...As is -A.

As such both are internally accurate, and therefore validation enough within the context of the individual data processing unit.

True and false are internally simulated symbolic representations of internally derived notions of truth and falsehood...Neither of which can be proven to be relative to a provable externality.

It's like saying that GOD exists because of the BIble...Anecdotally verifiable because billions of people are conditioned to accept without proof.

So NDE's are a result of a system under extreme stress, but most importantly a not dead system under stress...All evidence is anecdotal, and interested parties are prepared to accept such evidence without proof, because they have a conditioned enthusiasm to do so.

And of course, internal hallucinatory death experiences are not (currently) recordable...Though if they ever are, will we be witnessing anything more than a final dream.

Bottom line is, for some an afterlife is a want and reassurance is a constant.

An afterlife helps confirm what is true in the before life.

Debby wrote:

An afterlife helps confirm what is true in the before life.

Hmmm, not sure that the above as written, makes a lot of sense.

An after life confirms what you did in the previous life.

Well, after life would be after life...This is a truism...In fact, after life is after life.

Though the majority of what one has done in this life will already have been forgotten in this life...So an afterlife will only confirm a before life...But only if it is confirmable of course.

Though as it stands again, as you cannot prove an afterlife, I do not need to disprove an afterlife...Prove an afterlife and the debate is settled.

It’s called the Deja vu feeling like you have been there before.

Doesn't a general anesthetic prove that there is no afterlife?

It creates the illusion everything is blank.But that is only the state of your brain under anesthetic.

Well that is what "Deja vu" means.

And Deja vu is a living experience.

And anaesthesia is as an anaesthetic does...This is a truism.