OK, so I don't regularly find myself in either of those groups, but I do often find myself alone out on a limb in one of these discussions that includes the fractious phrase "What is truth?"
This happened to me tonight at church. We were discussing a recommendable German movie that we had just finished (After the Truth) and The Question [ominous music here] came up. Whenever you start to answer one of these, everybody goes red-flag hunting and prepare themselves to shout you down when they don't want to hear what you have to say. I know this because this is also often what I'm doing.
So here's maybe a clarification of what I mean to say in these conversations and only rarely am able to articulate.
In regards to truth, I hold a position that is, at least in some sense, epistemologically relative. What I mean by this is that while I do believe that there is a transcendent truth (which I more typically refer to as God), I also believe that this truth is somehow inherently mysterious. So, while we can occasionally catch glimpses of truth, truth is not something that we can know like a fact, possess like a book, or wield as a weapon. To put it another way, our own knowledge of the truth stems only from our quick glances at it.
Since God (which you'll recall, is what I am referring to when I say truth above) is infinitely great and we are finite (and terribly ungreat), we cannot own or even store this truth without damaging or distorting it, due to the fact that we're squeezing something so ginormously huge into something so devastatingly compact.
So the truth is out there. There is, in fact, that one truth which is objective and useful as a standard, but due to our inability to comprehend it, our nontranscendent truth-statements are in fact relative to ourselves and our contexts.
I think that's what I meant to say.
