In the beginning, prophets (or priests) were the source of truth.\u00a0 What they said was binding upon all within their stewardship and beyond question.\u00a0 In this way, authority and revelation were two peas within the same pod.\u00a0 Since prophets had no competition, truth was thought to be single and unified, but only within the immediate context.\u00a0 Since different prophets have stewardship over different times and places, their truth was not universal and unchanging in any transcendent sense.<\/p>\n
As the stewardships of these prophets expanded, it became practically necessary to record and transmit their words by writing.\u00a0 Thus, scribes came to be a derivative source of truth in that they interpreted the written word to those to sought access to prophetic guidance when there were no living prophets at hand.\u00a0 In was in this context that the words of prophets could and often did travel in space and time beyond their limited stewardships.\u00a0 Truth, then, began to appear more heterogeneous and at times conflictual.\u00a0 Within this context, the difference between living and dead prophets became blurry.<\/p>\n
Unlike the living prophets themselves, their words that had been written down, reproduced and spread throughout a large part of the world were immortal.\u00a0 There thus arose and spread situations in which the words of two dead prophets were compared and contrasted with zero regard for the limitations in their spatio-temporal stewardships.\u00a0 Indeed, even living prophets came to be measured by the words of dead prophets whose stewardship no longer carried any authority.\u00a0 A systematic harmony was thus sought \u2013 although hardly achieved – through an appeal to the tools of the Socratic dialectic and Aristotelian logic.\u00a0 In this way, the hierarchy of people was replaced with a hierarchical logic in which certain beliefs and propositions are subordinated by others.\u00a0 The people who dedicated their lives to this systematic harmony were scholars and during the middle ages they became the guardians and sources of truth.\u00a0 During this time, truth was again perceived to be unified in an idealized other-worldly sense that was universal and unchanging in a way that was quite foreign to the Hebrew tradition.\u00a0 Of these scholars, Galileo famously wrote, \u201cThese people believe there is no truth to seek in nature, but only in the comparison of texts.\u201d<\/p>\n
In opposition to the never-ending and apparently unsuccessful attempts by scholastics at unifying the written word with Aristotelian logic, there arose yet another Greek mode of thought, this time inspired by Plato, Pythagoras and Euclid.\u00a0 This mode of thought totally rejected the endless war of words amongst the scholars, insisting instead upon an appeal to mathematical deduction.\u00a0 The truth of the universe was thus taken to be written in holy words and Euclidean geometry.\u00a0 This mathematical focus, later combined with experimentalism, was the main impetus for the rise of science and scientists as sources of truth.\u00a0 In this context, truth came to be seen as a mathematical mirror of mechanical nature which thus had one universal and unchanging solution.\u00a0 One can find no stronger of an advocate of this source for truth than in Leonardo da Vinci, \u201cNo human investigation can call itself true science unless it proceeds through mathematical demonstrations\u2026. He who scorns the certainty of mathematics will not be able to silence sophistical theories which end only in a war of words\u2026\u00a0 Where there is clamor there is not true knowledge, because truth has a single ending; and when that is made known the contest is ended forever.\u201d (Frammenti letterari e filosofici, ed. E. Solmi, 85-95)<\/p>\n
In the late 19th<\/sup> Century, Gottlob Frege invented the first new logic since Aristotle.\u00a0 The invention (and especially the empirical confirmation) of non-Euclidean geometries soon inspired several efforts at reducing all mathematics to this new logic in which we could now find unity and certainty. \u00a0In this way, the rules of logical analysis were also able to bridge the mathematical models of science with everyday linguistics, thus serving not only to further establish science as a source of truth, but also to delegitimize other competing sources.\u00a0 (The logical positivists who sought to reduce all truth claims to logical claim that were transparently true or false to any audience by were the paradigmatic example of this.)\u00a0 In this way, the universal unity of truth that characterizes Euclidean geometry also characterized non-mathematical truths as well.<\/p>\n
![\"Absolute](\"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Absolute-Truth.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n