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Morality and Knowledge: A Parable

Submitted by Ken Watts on Wed, 10/10/2007 - 14:05
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A while back, a friend of mine shared a little parable with me—a kind of koan, really, which I've thought about from time to time ever since.

You are walking along a road, on a life journey, and you come to a fork. One road is marked "truth" and the other is marked "goodness". Which one should you take?

The story has a false idea at its heart, of course: the idea that truth and goodness necessarily lead in different directions. Obviously, truth is good. But I think that it is still a very useful exercise for several reasons.

First of all, that very false idea rings true (if you will) to our current culture wars. Take the debate over evolution as an example. Those who oppose the idea don't do it so much because they have run into compelling evidence that it is false, as because they think it is bad. Those who defend the theory don't do it so much because they think it is somehow virtuous as because they think it's true.

The same could be said for a great many controversies in our culture, and the sides would pretty much break along the same lines, for the same reasons.

So, in a sense, we are asking, and answering, that question these days—in spite of the false premise.

My own journey has taken the "truth" path, but for reasons that have to do with "goodness". One way of trying to get to the heart of the question is to accept the false premise, but turn the question inside out.

If the two roads really lead to different destinations, then one of them must have something wrong with it. So perhaps there's clearer way to pose the question. Which is the more likely danger—a false "goodness" or an evil "truth"?

This reminds me of something one of my professors in seminary said one day about a then current religious controversy: "It all boils down to who you're more afraid of—heretics or pharisees."

I've always been more afraid of pharisees. Unlike heretics, they feel they have the right to force their opinions down my throat.

And when I consider the parable, turned inside out like that, I have no problem choosing a path. The world is full of false "goodnesses"—whether that means hypocrisy,  or just a mistaken idea of what is good. And without recourse to some test for truth, we are at their mercy. If I want to correct an idea of goodness, I need to show that it is a false idea of goodness. That is, I have to appeal to truth.

But I have trouble seeing how any truth could be evil—or even what that would mean. And, even if such a thing existed, surely the cure would be the same--surely an evil truth must be a false truth.

And surely the cure for that is, well, the truth.