What is truth?

 What is truth? So Governor Pilate asked Jesus when the crowd cried for his death with no evidence of wrongdoing.

It was also the text of my first ever sermon when I was a university student and training as a lay preacher within the UK Methodist Church. Normally you start by sharing parts of the service with your mentor but since I came to the planning meeting with 3 points I got given the sermon.

I can't recall what I had to say about it, though somewhere I may have a floppy disc with evidence.  However it is a powerful question that is very important today and in the light of the US election of Nov 2020 the issue of truth versus claims is critical.

By a coincidence of scheduling this past week as well as bringing the US election count brought the BBC programme about lies in history. How many of us 'know' that in the French Revolution Maria Antoinette said of the hungry masses 'Let them eat cake' - except apparently she didn't. And the storming of the Bastille was not a grand liberation of political prisoners but 7 random men, and that actually the revolutionaries worked with the monarchy and elites for a couple of years before killing them. 

So to the 2020 US election - despite the rampant claims of the Trump loyalists, that there has been fraud on a massive scale, no evidence has passed muster in any of their legal claims. Yet the reality seems meaningless to upto 20 % of the American population.  80% of Americans are reported to accept the result of a Biden win, which leaves 1 in 5 still in doubt despite the thousands of votes in favour in each crucial state. In past election reviews the number of votes changed/removed were in the tens or just about 100s whilst the vote in favour of Biden was in tens of thousands.  

But what is truth? Is it the people who shout the loudest? No smoke without fire and all that. If one person can cast doubt on the truth as recognised by every other channel, where is our sense of truth?  Is truth about evidence or who shouts the loudest? Is doubt overwhelming even when it is proven wrong? 

 What about those accused of wrongdoing? It is embedded in our understanding of justice that we are 'innocent until proven guilty', yet the culture of trial by social media is such that someone is guilty by any association with someone else who is vaguely linked to a crime. 

Surely truth has a value of its own - not about claims but about evidence, but then as history is written by the victors in their own image we now seem to have arrived at a point where 'current reality' is now written as 'those who shout loudest'.  Maybe it was ever so, but the wider range of the loudest voice through modern technology brings a louder voice, regardless of what is actually truth.