by Candice Anderson

Created on: May 28, 2009

If you lived in the early 1800's and someone was to ask you if you could fly, you would probably look at them like they were crazy. To them the obvious truth would be no, only birds can fly. Yet by the early 1900's the Wright Brothers changed this truth. They created a way for humans to fly. So does that mean that the truth which was known in the 1800's was not true? No is simply means that truth is in fact conditional.

Throughout history we will find many instances where what seemed to be the truth was in fact not the truth at all. Truth is always based on the facts that we have at the present time. Anything that we perceive to be the truth can in fact be false when the conditions change. Before Christopher Columbus sailed around the world people believed that the world was flat. Before 1969 it was considered impossible to walk on the moon. History has shown us over and over again that truth is based on circumstances.

As a child of the early 1980's the thought of talking to someone else across the world and being able to see them was just something that you saw in a movie like Back to the Future. However today with the power of the internet it is a clear reality. The truth is that the truth changed when the conditions changed.

Truth is just a matter of perspective. In a simple court case the judge and jury must decided which statement is closer to the truth the defendant or the prosecutor. Is either story really the truth? Probably not, each story is based on the perspective of the story teller.

When you sit down with your family to talk about an event that happened such as a family vacation have you ever noticed how all the stories differ just a little bit. That's because the real truth is that all the stories are correct they are just from different perspectives. There is not one absolute truth, but in fact many conditional truths.

So what about the things that we feel are always true and will never change such as math. Well to some degree we may say that these are an absolute truth, however they are actually still conditional. Now how can that be? Because the truth that we are taught is our perspective. We are taught that it is an absolute truth and therefore it is still based on the condition that we perceive what we are taught to true.

I know it seems kind of crazy that something as basic as math could change, but there are plenty of accounts in history where what seemed to be an absolute truth was changed when the conditions change. Everything we know today is based on the information we are given at the time. Each one of us takes that information and decides on our own truth. Truth is in fact based on the conditions we give it.

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