Can We Even Know the Truth?

Before any argument for God can land, we have to answer whether truth exists and whether the mind can reach it.

The arguments on this site assumes something easy to overlook: that there is a truth about how things are, and that your mind can reach it.

For many people today that assumption is exactly what feels shaky:

• "That's true for you."
• "You can't really know anything."
• "Reason is just a tool of power."

If those slogans hold, then no argument for God — however tight — can even get started. So this is the honest first question, before the First Way or anything else.

The objection, at its strongest:

1. People disagree about almost everything, across cultures and centuries.
2. Our senses can deceive us, and our reasoning is shaped by upbringing and bias.
3. So claims to know objective truth are really just claims to power or preference.
4. The humble, tolerant position is to say no one has the truth.

In response:

• Total relativism refutes itself. The claim "there is no objective truth" is stated as an objective truth. If it's true, it's false. The moment someone argues that you shouldn't believe in truth, they are appealing to a standard they've just denied. You cannot even deny truth without using it.
• Disagreement doesn't erase truth; it presupposes it. Two people can only genuinely disagree if there's a fact of the matter they disagree about. If everything were mere preference, we wouldn't argue — we'd just have tastes, like preferring tea to coffee. The heat of our deepest disagreements is itself a sign that we think something real is at stake.
• Doubting the senses still uses the mind. Yes, senses sometimes mislead: a straw looks bent in water. But we know that because further reasoning and observation corrected it. Error is only detectable against a background of truths we can reach. A mind that could never know anything could never even discover its own mistakes.
• You can't function as a relativist. Nobody actually lives as though truth were optional. We look both ways before crossing, check the ground is solid before we put our weight on it, and get angry when someone lies to us — because we assume there was a fact they concealed. The relativism is spoken; the realism is lived.

What this stage assumes — and what it doesn't. None of this claims your reasoning is infallible, or that truth is always easy to reach. It claims something more modest and unavoidable:

• Truth exists: there is a way things actually are, independent of what we prefer.
• The mind can reach it: not perfectly, but really, through careful reasoning and honest attention.
• Some questions have real answers: and "does anything explain the world's existence?" is one of them, not a matter of taste.

That is all the arguments ahead require. They do not ask you to be certain in advance; they ask you to accept that the question is answerable, and then to follow the reasoning honestly.

Where this leads. If truth is real and reason can reach it, then the question of God is not a mood or a private feeling — it is a claim about reality that can be examined, argued, and tested. That is exactly what the next steps do.