This is inspired by an excerpt of Francis A. Schaeffer: The God Who is There. Basically, Schaeffer unveiled the transition from the “old” understanding of truth as concordance with facts in the objective world, to the “post-modern”, Hegelian understanding, where truth is an ever-changing synthesis, created in the clash of synthesis and antithesis in discourse.
I would confirm the old understanding that truth is an absolute, unchanging antithesis. Hegelian synthesis can only be, if anything, the incremental approximation of two theses, forming a synthesis as a new thesis, to an unknown true antithesis.
But, and this might be the reason why dualism / Hegelian synthesis emerged: people, esp. Christian people, by far over-applied rational, logical arguments. Namely, to areas where they did not know the starting conditions exactly enough to do any logical conclusion.
These areas are large, including all theology except the most basic stuff (the creation, the Christ, the work of Christ). A hint that one is in this area of misapplied antithetic truth is: if different people come to vastly different conclusions, and if it is apparent that logic was just instrumentalized to support ones pre-existing opinions.
And because this was the case so often, other people came to the conclusion that logic cannot lead to truth, resp. that there is no absolute truth. So they came up with dualism.
The solution to revive the “old” understanding of truth is to keep your silence and don’t argue if you don’t know the starting conditions exact enough. Arguing (more precisely here: speculation) is, in many cases, just done because it is so much easier and so much more interesting than doing the work. The work is, scientific experiments, measurements, data collection. Because people did not do the work, we’re lacking large amounts of even the most basic knowledge in areas such as theology. Instead, we have tons of speculation and clashing theories and struggling … .
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