The Anatomy of the Truth

Here is an incident about a murder at the theater.  A stage hand, up above by the rafters and on a platform where all the ropes and pulleys and lights, had a gun in his hand. He had it with one of the actors below playing a scene and he was going to shoot him just as the drama was about to become loud and confusing.  A second stage hand was suspicious so he went up there as well to see what the first stage hand was up to. When he saw the gun he went to grab it from the first stage hand and they struggled for it. The gun went off.  The first stage hand let go of it and immediately the second stage hand picked it up to prevent any more shooting. The first stage hand picked up something blunt and aimed it at the second stage hand hitting him at the base of the back of his neck rendering him unconscious. 

An audience sitting at the front row was hit and killed instantly from the one and only gunshot.  In the ensuing confusion the first stage hand climbed down and exited through the back of the theater. He rushed to cross the street when at that moment a car hit him.  He was dead by the time he hit the ground.

Once it was identified where the shot came from in a matter of minutes, theater security and an off-duty cop went up to the platform above the stage to find the second stage hand recovering from the blunt trauma.  He naturally tested positive for gunpowder burns in his hand and his fingerprints were on the gun. The prosecutor convinced the jury that the injury on the suspect (second stage hand) was self-inflected when he slipped after firing the gun.  The second stage hand was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Well, the truth died with the first stage hand after he was hit by the car. The second stage hand’s version of the story could not save him in court and there was nothing he could do about it. It looked like the truth will be buried forever.

What is wrong with the whole story? Why can’t the narrator of the story testify for the defense? I told the story.  I wasn’t there. I merely told a plausible story based on what the second stage hand said all along but it had no weight whatsoever because there was no one to corroborate it. And there lies the problem with the truth. (I made up that story to drive the conversation, so please don't look it up)

Via, Veritas, Vita - The Way, The Truth and The Life, are the beacons that are to guide adherents to the Christian faith. Of the three, truth is the most elusive. All three are in every human experience. We always find a way regardless of what life we choose to live, managing to find different ways to live it and still finding we fall short of the ideal.   Lives lived will therefore vary, one not necessarily better than the other and there should be no indictment on which is far superior to another. For the most part, that is, because there are social and moral standards where lives lived and the ways they were lived are measured against.  For civilized society to survive in the manner that it had so far, religion and philosophy spoke of and to the same attributes – Via, Veritas, Vita.

The truth, however, is and should be the uncompromising one. What event occurs and the manner in which it occurs, how and what words are spoken, what and how actions are made hold indelible properties. They are permanently recorded in space and time and cannot be eradicated. But unless recorded on audio/video, such occurrences are often subject to recollection and interpretation by man. And there lies the reason why truth is often hard to come by, let alone be determined without equivocation.

Despite the world’s almost universal (though not totally) proclamation of faith in one form or another, we are still an anthropocentric species. Everything we see around us is reckoned from and on the basis of our interests. We interpret everything from that point of view. The universe is what it is because we are there to observe it; hence, we are the center of the universe. That being the case, it is not surprising that events, spoken words, gestures and actions are treated the same way – individually by every person. That explains why the same events are recounted by witnesses differently, sometimes wholly or partially, with nuances and details minutely registered one way or in many other ways.

In Agatha Christie’s novel, “And Then there were None”, not the movie version, we were told of a fictional version of how the truth can be buried so effectively in a plot where all the characters were killed including the killer but the truth died with all of them.

While the story above is a work of fiction, aren’t there many instances in history or recent events where the truth eludes final judgment? There were many sensational cases that despite all-out investigation, full of evidence and eyewitness accounts, the matters remained unresolved (or at least not to the satisfaction of everyone). Often the truth is extrapolated for lack of solid evidence.

King Solomon did such an extrapolation when he ruled for the woman who would rather give up the disputed child rather than for it to be cut in half, each half given to each of the two women who claimed to be the mother of the child. That decision is often cited to exemplify King Solomon’s wisdom. There was no DNA evidence then at that time, so can we say that the truth was clearly arrived at? Well, the Biblical story, if I were to interpret it, emphasizes that King Solomon’s wisdom, in this case, was guided by God, evidence of providential justice derived from a higher power.

The best we can come up with in the western justice system is to ask witnesses to “solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.  Undoubtedly, there were many cases where that has not been followed to the letter by every witness. It is being used as if it has inoculative powers or the effects of a truth serum when in fact it is nothing more than a suggestion. And the best that can be done is a threat of punishment from committing perjury –a procedure that is itself calling for another trial where witnesses must come forward and again admonished to tell the truth …

The anatomy of the truth, if not supported by hard and clear evidence or by witnesses beyond reproach (idealistic rather than a real condition), is beyond autopsy by us - humans. The space and time that is the recorder of all events pass through at the speed of light.

Imagine being blindfolded, made to enter a dark room sealed from the outside. The door closes and, immediately, you hear footsteps, not sure if from one or more persons. You hear a thud then footsteps and the door opened and closed. You removed the blindfold finding the room pitch dark. After a minute a light came on and now you can clearly see something happened when you looked down on the floor. You looked around and there was no one else.  Clearly, you had to extrapolate what happened. The truth of what happened is beyond extraction.  If you were to guess it will have to be wholly based on a few things that had to do with your background (are you a lawyer, a scientist, a man of the cloth, what are your experiences, your gender, your level of education, etc.).  Investigators who later came after you called will have to sift through any evidence. Your testimony will be limited to what you heard as far as the actual event is concerned but you will be asked mainly for why, when and how you were blindfolded and every other circumstance that led you to that room.  We can say that much of that will be uncovered but the truth on what happened in that room will have to be extrapolated.

That by the way is the reason anthropocentrism is flawed because we cannot perceive the universe to be what it is based on everything that we observe. Or put another way, since we cannot observe everything then we cannot determine what the universe truly and wholly is. If we cannot know the truth, do some of us not ask, “God please tell me”, as a last resort?

Does the courtroom then also beg, as a last resort, when the witness is asked, to “solemnly swear to tell …truth?”  In some courts the witness is no longer required to put one hand on the actual Bible while answering the question.

I cannot find an actual text in Aramaic so I picked up the Latin version, “Ego sum via veritas et vita”. That is what we are left with in the Judeo Christian belief system if we must go beyond our capability to find what is, or get to the anatomy of the truth.