Brad Alles

One Post-Modern claim would be the following: there is no truth, just interpretations by different people and cultures, and all are equally valid. Take the resurrection of Jesus as an example. In Post-Modern thought, the “Christian truth” is that Jesus rose from the dead, while in the “Muslim truth”, He didn’t even die on the cross, let alone rise from the dead. David Noebel states it this way: “There is no universal Truth (capital ‘T’); there are only ‘truths’ (small ‘t’) that are particular to a society or group of people and limited to individual perception.” These small “t” truths would encompass religion, science, education, and anything else related to particular cultures, which are arbitrary beliefs societies have conditioned their people to accept.

But did you notice a contradiction in this worldview? Remember that one test for a worldview is that it doesn’t have contradictions. If something is logically inconsistent, it cannot be true. In the example of the resurrection, there is an obvious contradiction—the Christian and Muslim both cannot be right. Did Jesus die or didn’t He? Did He rise from the dead or didn’t He? And as for the Post-Modern claim that there are no universal truths, just cultural ones, even Secular Humanists disagree: “Science has become a universal language, speaking to all men and women, no matter what their cultural backgrounds.” For example, no matter where you go, people die, two plus two equals four, and the moon goes through phases.

Greater still is the larger contradiction within the Post-Modern worldview claim that there is no truth. Proposing that there is no truth is a truth statement. Thus the Post-Modernist reveals a self-defeating position since its own claim must be included in the statement, “There is no truth.” It is being inconsistent to say, “The truth is, there is no truth.” Or to put it a different way, author Nancy Pearcey said, “The key slogan of postmodernism is ‘Truth is made, not found.’…Beliefs are merely human constructions, like the gadgets of modern technology…The most devastating argument we can use against this radical reductionism is that it undercuts itself. If ideas and beliefs are not true but only useful for controlling the environment, then that applies to the idea of postmodernism itself. And if postmodernism is not true, then why should the rest of us give it any credence?”