The simple word "truth" means different things to different people. Deeply religious people might consider their faith to be "truth," while researchers might strive to find "truth" via confirming their scientific hypotheses in the laboratory. Are these people talking about the same thing when they say "truth"? If not, are the competing "truths" reconcilable or are they fundamentally opposed; that is--is one group of "truth"-seekers wrong? More importantly, is it even meaningful to discuss "truth" at all?

This question of "truth" rose to prominence in academia during the 1990s. A third group of people, whom we will call the postmodernists, argued that neither the religious people nor the scientists were actually pursuing "truth." They asserted that there is no objective truth or reality, and thus no one could actually know the "truth." Since they focused their attacks on the scientific community, this brouhaha is known as the Science Wars. (The aptly-titled Teaching Company lecture series Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Steven L. Goldman is an excellent and exhaustive resource for further information on this topic.)

This subject is ripe for some skeptical inquiry. We have two sides with disparate "truth" claims, and a third side claiming that everyone is ultimately wrong. To begin, we need to tighten our definitions to get everyone speaking the same language. Let's ditch the quotation marks, and rigorously define Truth versus truth.

Capital-T Truth

Unfortunately, we're quickly going to run into vocabulary limitations while discussing the Truth/truth distinction. What I mean by capital-T Truth is a deep, cosmic, ultimate, comprehensive understanding of absolutely everything. Terms such as omniscient and omnipresent come to mind. For ouglas Adams fans, I'm talking about 42; for the uninitiated, 42 represents the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Many religious people would say that their God or gods are their Truth, or perhaps that their religion comprises or gives insight into this Truth. I imagine that philosophers stay up discussing Truth into the wee hours of the morning. Capital-T Truth is *how* and *why* reality operates, in every sense of those tiny words.

Little-t truth

Little-t truth, on the other hand, does not aspore to being *the* explanation of everything. A little-t truth is just *an* explanation of how things work or *the* explanation of how one thing probably works based on available information. Little-t truth need not be cosmic in scale and profound in depth, nor must it answer why-type questions.

As the structure of the last paragraph implies, there can be, and indeed are, many truths (as opposed to the solitary Truth). Little-t truths can come in all shapes and sizes, and they can be contradictory or complementary to one another. Indeed, any given person might subscribe to a variety of truths, even contradictory ones.

Is Science Truth?

As I insinuated, talking about Truth immediately indicates deep philosophical and/or religious notions. But, what about science? Does science give us Truth, or is the scientific worldview merely one truth among many? The answer to this question may surprise and trouble you. Indeed, it is the basis for a variety of serious attacks levied against science from various ontological adversaries. I have seen religious people, postmodernists, and objectivists all pounce on the scientific worldview due to the answer I'm about to give you.

No, science does not provide Truth.

To help explain this, consider the example of the historical development of the "scientific consensus" on how the solar system works. Thousands of years ago, it was believed that the sun was pulled around the earth in a chariot by a sun god. Society eventually lost the deity, but kept idea that the sun was moving around the earth for some time. Copernicus and Galileo both argued for a heliocentric solar system where the planets orbited the sun in a circle, while Johannes Kepler utilized Tycho Brahe's meticulous data to demonstrate that the planets' orbits are actually elliptical. Isaac Newton explained why the orbits were elliptical--the force of gravity, elegantly unifying both the waltz of the heavens and the crude motion of boulders down terrestrial hills. Finally, thanks to Albert Einstein, it is now understood that the planets are merely traversing a straight line through spacetime that becomes curved by gravitations force of the massive sun.

Clearly, the scientific worldview has changed drastically over the past twenty-five centuries. Furthermore, no one asserts that the scientific observation of the solar system is finished! We may yet learn new things about the mechanics involved. General relativity is fundamentally incompatible with Einstein's other brainchild, quantum mechanics. Some physicists expect to discover virtual gravitons that pull the earth towards the sun, while others anticipate that the jiggles of the membranes predicted by string theory will eventually explain all of cosmology. Many candidly admit that they just don't know what the future holds.

In light of all this, science simply cannot provide Truth. Each of these ideas about the solar system comprises a truth. Throughout this millennia-long (and counting) scientific progression of truths, the Truth about the solar system has not changed. Apollo didn't stop dragging the sun around when Rome fell, nor did space and time merge into spacetime when Einstein had a brilliant flash of insight at the patent office. Our knowledge of the truth have changed, but what the solar system is "really up to" (the Truth) has neither changed nor been discovered.

Did Science Lose the Science Wars?

If science isn't giving us Truth, then what good is it? This is bad, right? All these guys attacking science must be on to something; the non-scientists in the Science Wars are winning, or might even have already won! The religious people are correct that science cannot provide Truth but they supposedly can. The postmodernists are correct that science is just one truth among many. The objectivists are correct that science has forsaken Truth in lieu of mere truth.

Despite the dramatic buildup, there's actually no problem here whatsoever. This point, and indeed the entirety of the Science Wars, is much ado about nothing. Though science does not provide Truth, it is a system for determining individual truths, which can sometimes be put together to lead to larger truths. Thus, the scientific consensus in a given domain is objectively the best truth we have. The scientific worldview adopts the best explanations for the best available data, and readily changes itself upon the discovery of new phenomena or the substantiation of superior theories.

"Woah woah woah," cries the religious person, "my god provides Truth! Weren't you listening?!"

Claiming that your personal truth is a Truth does not make it so. Each of the countless world religions maintains that it has the Truth, while every other worldview has it at least slightly wrong. None of them has evidence to support this assertion, or even definitive evidence that such a Truth exists in a meaningful way.* Take a precursory glance at Catholicism: the details of Christ's divinity was more-or-less voted on over the years, and the church explicitly decided to accept evolution over creationism at some point in the recent past. We can argue about what Truth precisely is, but it certainly is not democratic or fluid.

*You can construct philosophical arguments that Truth must exist. The fact that basic logic exists and works gives some credence to the concept of Truth. For instance, causes always precede effects; thus, you can claim that Truth exists and comprises at the very least the basic principle of cause-and-effect. The important point here is that this philosophical meandering has nothing to do whatsoever with any single world religion, since the establishment of this basic premise does not actually prove that any particular deity exists or that any particular religion is more valid than any other.

"Woah woah woah," cries the postmodernist, "who are you to proclaim science the best truth? You're just a prejudiced westerner who arrogantly thinks his pet truth is the best!"

Well, the problem perhaps comes from characterizing it as the "best." Perhaps it is better to say that science has painstakingly developed a method for arriving at the truth that eliminates as much bias and potential for error and misinterpretation as possible.  Science recognizes human weakness and adjusts for it when seeking the truth. Other "truths" which are cultural are often subject to human bias and weakness and no system is used to correct for it. Science does not allow something to be proclaimed the truth unless it has been rigorously tested. Science is self-correcting and ever-improving. When new or improved data is collected, we can test all our new and old hypotheses against this data. Going back to my cosmology example, you can easily demonstrate by testing the various theories that general relativity is superior to gravity, which is superior to Copernican circles, which is superior to geocentrism.** The improved data need not be esoteric or a mere shrinking of error bars, either; for instance, what looks like a fuzzy star by eye resolves unequivocally into an entire galaxy with the use of better telescopes. If some group of indigenous people on an island thinks those stars are holes torn in the sky, we can show them the telescope and demonstrate where their perception has gone wrong, knowing that our perception might have gone similarly wrong had we not had the telescope. Science equally recognizes that those same people may have some understanding of the truth or tool for understanding it that we have not stumbled upon yet. Science is not racist to demonstrate where one person or people are going wrong. Science cares only for uncovering the truth and will prove or disprove the theories of anyone, no matter their cultural origin. It will also accept the theories of anyone, if they have been rigorously tested by the scientific method and proven to work as hypothesized. Science recognizes that we ALL have human weaknesses of observation and memory and that we ALL have biases and preferences. It does not seek to put one culture's truth above another's, but to correct for the filters that all our cultures have placed upon our various perceptions of the world.

**This point also might be relevant if a religious person claims that you need to have the Truth handy (which, of course, they think they do) to compare to candidate truths.

"Woah woah woah," cries the objectivist, "we do Real Science, and it can provide Truth!"

There is a faction of Ayn Rand's objectivist movement that really despises certain aspects of modern physics. The objectivists believe that there is one objective truth and that it's possible to find the objective truth in regards to anything, even things that are generally acknowledged to be personal, such as aesthetics, morals and values. It seems that this faction feels that science has abandoned logic and reason in the areas where science accepts that there may be more than one reality, or truth, this especially happens in regards to general relativity and quantum mechanics. Where scientific observation seems to support the existence of more than one truth at the same time, the objectivists feel that science has abandoned the "real" truth, that there can only be one reality or truth for everything. It is, in a sense, the opposite of post-modernism.

Though their position can seem superficially scientific, these objectivists' Truth claim is no more scientific or logical or reasonable than any religion's Truth claim. The areas of science that they object to are as rigorously tested as  any other, and science accepts even things that seem to fly in the face of expectation, so long as they can pass rigorous testing using scientific method. Thus, since their premise leads to the conclusion that certain types of particle behavior which have been observed through scientific experimentation by physicists are in fact impossible (according their theory of an objective and immutable truth and reality in all areas of life), they have nothing but a false premise. Theirs is simply another religious belief dressed in science's clothing.

Truthiness, Or Would It Be truthiness

Science, religion, postmodernism, and objectivism; these are the bitter fronts in the Science Wars. To (over)extend the war analogy, the conventional fighting seems to be over but the guerrilla tactics have just begun. Science won the early battles: overt creationism isn't in the classroom or laboratory, postmodernists are largely relegated to the fringes of the humanities, and Ayn Rand's only recent claim to fame is a disparaging shout-out on the back of Jon Stewart's satirical textbook. But, the fighting continues, from local school boards to college faculty meetings to internet message boards.

The skeptic has an interesting role to play in this academic conflict. In general, we ought to align ourselves with the scientists. Spurious Truth claims and unwarranted attacks on the scientific consensus need to be addressed. However, we also must guard against scientists overstepping their bounds and claiming Truth. Recognition that even the best-established scientific theories are ultimately provisional is vital; it is the only way that old theories will continue to be honestly challenged and new theories will get their fair shot at the data. One need only to google Lysenkoism to see the effects of a scientific theory wrongly proclaimed to be Truth.

Science doesn't provide the sort of Capital-T Truth allegedly provided by many religions and philosophies. And that's okay! The scientific worldview is a compilation of the very best little-t truths that we've come up with to explain the world around us. Though that isn't Truth, it is the best we've got. Plenty of people profess to have the Truth, but I would go ahead and be skeptical of that assertion if I were you.