Hello everyone and I bid you happy returns to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the Ocean of Truth. Of course, if you are here for the first time, welcome aboard and I hope that you will return. We are going through a look at the doctrine of God now in Christian thought and our guide for this has been the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. You can read a copy of this work for yourself at newadvent.org or you can even order it on Kindle. Tonight, we’re going to be finishing up our look at the subject of falsity and asking if truth and falsity are contraries.
Picture a rock in your mind. The size doesn’t really matter. It can be a massive rock out in the ocean or it can be a rock that can be found in some driveways. Whatever kind or size of rock that you have in your mind, I want you to just get a good image of it.
Now I’d like you to picture a blind rock.
Okay. I hope you’re really confused at this point. We all know rocks can’t see, but we would hardly call a rock blind. However, if I asked you to picture a blind man, you could do that. It could be that some of you know someone who is blind. (Or through the hearing of this blog being read, some of you are blind)
When we speak of blindness, we speak of something that is blind that by nature normally isn’t. Blindness in that sense is a privation. Blindness in the rock is not one but blindness in the human being is due to the nature of the human being in comparison to that of the rock.
In this way, falsity does describe something by comparison. Truth describes something in a thing that is there in actuality. Falsity describes the privation of a thing. It is not the existence of something in a thing. Blindness exists only as an idea for instance. It is the same way evil exists. Evil does not exist as a reality in something but as an actual absence of what ought to be there.
However, when we speak then, we speak of that which is and that which is not. These two are contraries. There can be no middle ground. Something either exists or it does not. It reminds me of the time my pastor was doing a sermon in our church that is small, but we’ve had a string of births within it lately and the pastor speaking about being saved said “It’s like pregnancy. You either are or you aren’t and if you’re here chances are you are.”
So we conclude then that truth and falsity are indeed contraries and because of this, the closer we get to the truth of God, the further we will move away from falsity in our own lives. Let us make it a point to be children of truth and live by that truth so we can banish all that which is contrary from our lives.
Tomorrow, we start looking at the life of God.
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