What is truth?

This is one of the most profound questions of the Johannine gospel; actually, it is one of the most profound questions ever asked. The vignette is this: after Jesus has told Pontius Pilate that he has come to testify to truth, Pilate asks him, "What is truth?"

Jesus never answers him.

In a series of comments I was reading in a discussion about Richard Dawkins' new film, one respondent writes, "Most religions proclaim to know truth and hence aren't searching for it."

Of course, in most cases this couldn't be further from the truth (pun intended.) It is true that fundamentalists are certain they have the truth - whether that fundamentalist is Richard Dawkins or Fred Phelps.

For most of the rest of us, our lives are a search for truth. That is one of the reasons I am interested in science. And it is also why I am a seeker within my Christian faith as well. We are each born knowing nothing, nothing at all. Not one of us can walk, comprehend, or even see clearly when we are born. (It is an interesting side anecdote, but people born blind who become sighted are usually unable to make sense of the sensory input - we even have to learn how to see.)

So how do we learn? As an adult, I experience things. And then I cross-reference those experiences against other things that I have experienced, and try and frame the new event in the light of those past referents. And yet, I vaguely remember not knowing anything at all - my earliest memory is an astonishingly clear understanding of my own newness.

From this clarity, we descend into an abstract world of interrelationships. Grass is green. Plants are green. Grass is a plant. Our faculty of reason works this way too. We deductively validate hypotheses by extrapolating from observational data and the existing body of scientific knowledge.

But what if this is not the only way to find truth? What if there is one truth for which there is no cross-reference or precedent? A truth our deductive faculties can't reach, but which spiritual faculties perhaps can?

The ceiling of the Cistine chapel more eloquently expresses in imagery what I am trying to with words. Something inside ourselves - a longing that is hard to describe - reaches to the sky, to the unknown, to find some transcendent, unprecedented source that might answer that question, "Why am I here?" And on my very best days, I feel like perhaps my outstretched finger brushes up against something unimaginably immense and powerful, something I have no other experience I can compare it with. It is an unspeakable knowledge, one which any eloquence I have or lack is unable to touch. But as near and far as it always is, I must always try to touch it, even if I never quite can.

Could this perhaps be "truth"?