There is a lot of stuff to know these days.  Today's is an age where information comes easily.  Very easily.  Remarkably easy.  So easy in fact that at this moment, you can come up with 360,000,000 ideas in under half of a second.  I just did this on google, simply by typing "ideas" in the search bar.  Information is easy to come by.  But I find that the tension comes in determining the legitimacy of information and is this information truly fact or is it simply knowledge?

Now let that question hang for a moment: is all knowledge fact and are all facts knowledge?

I have a friend that I used to work with; a young guy who was getting ready to enter his first year of college.  For his age, his mind is well-tuned to asking questions and questioning answers.  Normal is not enough for people like this.  He wants to be knowledgeable and rejects common activities which deny that pursuit.  He doesn't drink, doesn't party, and selectively picks his friendships.  In fact, I spent much time in talking with him truly admiring certain of his yet untapped leadership qualities.  But this thirst for knowledge comes with a catch 22, especially at his age: he is incredibly cynical.  Rather than objectively measuring the ideas presented to him, he questions everything he was ever told by anyone.  I must have spent many an hour in the short amount of time I was assigned to work with him discussing philosophy, history, anthropology, and religion.  And with his youth and awareness of his gift of thought came an inherently obstinate tendency to believe that he was always right.   

I haven't seen him in a couple of years now.  But in a recent social networking interaction that I have had with him, I challenged him yet again to be careful in discerning the difference between "questioning" ideas and "measuring" them; truly the difference between an argument and a discussion.  And in return he first expressed his appreciation of our discussions in the past and second his realization that he wasn't necessarily right all that time, but that everyone has their own truths.

Does this sound familiar yet?  "Everyone has their own truths"

As a believer and follower of the risen Christ, I choked on that statement for a moment.  (this parenthetical space is placed here for you to interact with the previous sentence for a moment and continue)  But when that moment passed, I decided to step back for a moment and ask myself why I took issue.  It's true that everyone's different experiences greatly affect their perspectives.  What I interpret to be a father, for instance, will radically differ from another person's interpretation because everyone's experience with their father was different.  But it wasn't anything theological that bothered me about the subjectivity of truth, but the nature of the dichotomy of knowledge and fact.  They are not the same.

The nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, famous for his contributions in thought during the early modern thought period, expressed his distaste for theology in his nihilistic philosophy.  One of his primary works was on perspectivism, a notion that knowledge is bound to perspective.  But it is because of this lens of perspective that everything that we gain while gaining knowledge is altered; it is never mere fact.  It would seem that even the man famous for saying that "God is dead", while not believing in an absolute god still believes in absolute facts, or truths.

Think of it this way: let's say I am sitting in the room with you and I place an orange down on your keyboard.  I tell you to release all ideas of perspective and answer this question: is this an orange?  Now we could discuss what one would use this fruit for, what language would be used to identify it, or an other ideas concerning this round, rinded object.  You could know how to make juice out of it and I could teach you how to make a salad from it changing each others' perceptions of how you would consume this orange, but nothing can change that this object contains all of the biological and nutritional properties that make an orange an orange.  This is the difference between knowledge and fact.

Now my purpose here isn't to discuss absolutes in existential truth or any such lofty notion.  Yet neither will I distinguish between truth and fact.  They are fully synonymous.  My purpose here is to challenge thought.  Even Nietzsche, while discarding a being that could be the source of all truth in the universe, proclaimed that there are facts in the universe that cannot be changed, manipulated, altered, or challenged by our own individual sense of truth.  And so neither can a man rationally determine that his facts, so called, are different from those of another.  In order for the knowledge that we have to be claimed as truth or fact, it must be objective rather than subjective.

So here is my challenge for today: what are you so certain of that you have not yet measured objectively and are the things that you know true...or is it incomplete data.  Learn to take your quest for information seriously and don't simply stop with "what feels right for me."

Peace