Anthony Bosman shares his journey through various worldviews. Join Anthony on his quest to discover truth! 

ACF Institute 2017: Never Alone

<p>Anthony Bosman shares his journey through various worldviews. Join Anthony on his quest to discover truth! </p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Christian Fellowship (ACF)

Anthony Bosman

Seeking Truth, Discovering Love

You guys remember the first class we took?

You go there, you look at the date, you put a scope out where that's at, you don't want to get lost, right?

My first class was this required humanities class, the freshman at Stanford University, and it was called Truth, 1, Many, or None.

And throughout the course of this class, I was taught by 2 professors, they would go back and they would debate.

1 professor took the side of there is no truth, Professor Hussein, he was a nihilist, he was an expert in Ichi.

He said there is no ultimate truth, no ultimate meaning, no ultimate purpose.

The other 1, big fan of Plato, he took the position that there's 1 truth.

But they both agreed You can't have many truths, right?

If there's truth in me, not truth for you, that doesn't make sense.

So here I am sitting there as a freshman and trying to decide, man, what is it?

Is there 1 ultimate truth or is there no truth?

And it actually wasn't that tough a decision because I was a total math geek.

And the nice thing about math is, well, there's always an answer, right?

Okay, that's not exactly true, but that's kind of the sentiment, the feeling about mathematics.

Maybe if I was into humanities, maybe I would think, oh, it's all subjective, you know, feelings, whatever.

But math, right, it comes down to this 1 truth.

So I'm sitting there, and I'm beginning university with this conviction that there is truth.

In many ways, this set the tone for my university experience.

Now I don't know what you're excited about at university.

Maybe it's like the fun parties, or the social life, or the getting ready for a job, or going to the career course.

But For me, it's this idea that we can know truth.

Right, like this energized me as a student.

Like, university's great, we can go out, we can discover truth, we can think about things deeply, we can teach in classes.

And so, I was obsessed with this idea of knowing truth.

But what I also discovered in this class, this humanities class, is that not only am I a total math geek, I'm just like a total geek.

So we have these discussion sections where we read some kind of philosophy and discuss it.

And there'll always be that 1 kid in the discussion section I'm totally into it.

And everyone else is like, oh, it's a required class, it didn't really do the reading, I don't really care what this dead guy thought about, you know, whatever, right?

But then I was there and I was like, gosh, Plato, this is his argument, or Nietzsche, or the current, look how these people, I was just totally into it.

But so here I am as a freshman at university with this deep conviction that there is truth and we could know it.

Not just in mathematics, but the truth about reality, right?

So very much my university experience became about, well, I want to know what truth is.

I grew up believing some things, maybe because my parents taught me it, or I learned it in a church setting, or in a community, or whatever.

But now it's my chance to go out and discover what is true.

You're a freshman, so of course your qualified to answer the biggest question there is.

Right, like, how can I know, like, know with confidence that there is a God?

Not just because someone told me, not because I didn't read, but how can I know this?

So I started taking all these philosophy classes.

I get to know pretty well the professor, the professor saying, he was the nihilist, that there is no offending meaning, there is no God.

I remember this 1 time we were going on a hike together.

So we're going on this hike and he was telling me all these things.

He was giving me these arguments against the existence of God, things like the problem of evil.

The problem is when you're a nihilist and you don't believe in good and evil, it's not very compelling when we try to make an argument about the problem of evil.

So I'm like, I don't know, I'm not really convinced by this.

I started taking some classes on philosophy of science.

Questions like, why is there something instead of nothing?

Questions like, why is the universe structured?

Questions like, why does mathematics describe reality?

Questions like, why are we able, why are we rational, right?

If we're just the result of natural processes, if we're just the result of an unguided chemical process, then why are we able to pursue truth?

Why are we able not, it's not just surviving, actually, to know what is true, right?

So these are the kinds of questions I think they're invested in.

Questions like, we not only can describe how the world is, but we can describe how it ought to be.

We have a sense of justice, a sense of morality.

And so I was like, what makes sense of all these things?

I'm like, you know, throw God out, you really, the whole system seems to crumble.

So I became very convinced through all these different means that there is a God.

And I was interested that actually this isn't that strange of an idea at a university.

I was talking to the chair of the philosophy department, and I expected she was a total atheist.

Chair of the philosophy department, she specializes in the philosophy of science.

But we were having lunch and the topic of faith came up.

And she pointed out, she was like, I actually have serious problems with atheism.

How can you describe all these things we've talked about?

How can you describe why there's a universe and it's structured and there's an order to it?

She said, I don't think that it's compelling.

I don't think that it makes sense of all these things that philosophy tries to make sense of.

But then she went on and she said, but I also don't accept any of the religious depictions of God.

All of them that I see, they all seem problematic as well.

So she's kind of in this state of, well, I don't, atheism has problems, but everything has problems, right?

I remember my sophomore year, there was a group on campus, I think they were well-meaning, a Christian group, they were trying to recruit new people or do whatever they felt like they needed to do.

So they put up posters, you know, drawings were all across campus of hellfire, right?

And it was, come hear these testimonies of these people who had a vision of hell and came back and told about it.

And I was like, yeah, you know, if that's your depiction of God, I probably wouldn't take that too seriously either, right?

That's probably not something I'd entertain either.

But once you're confident that there is a God, and you have all these competing narratives, the question becomes, what is God like?

So I became very invested in getting to know friends with different religious backgrounds, different faith communities.

Spring break of my freshman year, I spent a week just going to different religious communities.

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Seeking Truth, Discovering Love

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