The Cedarville Situation: What is Truth?
The key to understanding the problem in the modern Truth and Certainty debate lies in the way one understands truth. Or to borrow a famous question asked by a harried man who was looking Truth in the face at the time: "What is truth?" [John 18:38].
The traditional answer to that question is known as "The Correspondence Theory of Truth" which states that a proposition is true if it corresponds to reality. At least for a time, that seemed to be the position espoused by Cedarville as evidenced by Dr. David Mills' brief paper on the topic entitled Definitions of Key Epistemological Terms and Implications for Christian Faith. This paper was at one time available on Cedarville's web site on the Truth and Certainty resources page. I am unable to find it there (or anywhere else on Cedarville's site) any longer, so I can not speak to whether or not the school has changed or refined their understanding of truth, or if perhaps Mills' definition was one of several competing ones.
In any case, the Correspondence Theory of truth proves to be inadequate. It suffers from the same flaw as Descartes famous solution to the doubt of one's own objective existence: "I think, therefore I am." Both ideas posit something contingent as though it is ultimate, which is a great error. More on this in my next post.
