Everyone today has a different definition of truth. I live in Utah. People around me were trained from infancy to declare "The Book of Mormon is True." They are taught that their religious leaders have truth. Everyone else is in error.

It is infuriating. It is impossible to communicate with people with such a partisan definition of truth.

The Socratic and Aristotelian traditions saw truth as something elusive. Socrates sought truth with his dialogues but never wrote things down knowing that people could change the definition of words an obfuscate any dialog.

Aristotle created syllogisms. Syllogisms were only valid over a finite domain and were never absolute.

The basic idea here is that there is a truth. We can get glimpses of it, but truth is always beyond us.

Science seems to confirm this. Of course, science arises from the Aristotelian tradition.

People have been discussing these issue since antiquity.

I'm no religious scholar, but I would suspect that it all began as an attempt by early humans to "explain the unexplainable."

I prefer philosophy to theology. Philosophers in Greece and later the Library of Alexandria were discussing all of the themes found in the Bible long before the Bible was first transcribed.

It is likely that both Judaism and Christianity were influenced by philosophy. This is why Christianity meshes well with philosophy.

NOTE: Judaism claims to predate philosophy. However, there is little evidence for the story of Moses.

Both Persians and Greeks advocated the rule of law. The easiest way to establish the rule of law is to create a mythical law giver. The story of Moses and Mosaic law magically appeared in a time when people were looking for a mythical law giver.

I think the best path forward is for people to discuss the interplay between philosophy, logic and theology and that people would do well to acknowledge that people have limited minds and that we only have a limited understanding of unexplainable things like truth and god.

Thanks for the reply.