Seeking Truth-no easy task

Truth. What is it? Does it exist? Are there absolute truths? The last few weeks I have been soul searching and asking myself a lot of questions. I do this rather frequently, but normally the searching eventually wears off and I move on to something else. This topic, however, has stuck with me. Probably because it has no definable answer. What I have begun to understand, after some examination, is that "truth" and "fact" are not the same thing to me. This is a recent revelation, so recent in fact, that I used the two as meaning the same just a few posts ago. I now believe they are different. I found a blog by another fellow seeker of truth. He was writing about religion and truth. He wrote, very cerebrally, what I felt:

Part of the antipathy between people who take the Bible as literal truth and those who don't stems less from spiritual integrities than from language use. Truth is, a fact may not always represent a truth and that the truth about something may not always be supported by the facts. Truthfully, in fact, fact and truth are NOT the same word, though most people tend to blur the distinction. "Truth" is a larger and more comprehensive term than "fact". Facts are a subset of truth. Facts require verification or proof, truth does not. I can know it to be perfectly true that I love my dog and that my dog loves me but that doesn't mean I could prove it to others by way of facts. More importantly, that lack of factual proof has zero bearing on the truth of the love I experience. Another point, truth can be experienced individually in isolation from the sensory world, facts require experiential consensus.

I find it hard to argue with his logic. One cannot prove love; therefore, to love, to feel and understand love, is not a "fact" in the scientific understanding of "fact." It is true that I love. It is true that I feel love. Could we come up with some sort of measurement that would give us a defining "fact" that what we experience is love? Maybe, but then that may be different for each and every person.
That leads me into another thought, is truth relative? To tackle that I first needed to know "relative truth" vs. "absolute" truth. In college I took a Philosophy of Science class. What is the Philosophy of Science one may ask? I can tell you I still have no friggen idea. The class was a blur of ramblings and presuppositions. The professor was a high on himself Brit (no offense to Brits) who thought we were all a bunch of back country bumpkins. So why am I bringing this up? Well, in order to try to understand these two truths, I had to try and remove some bias. I ended up on a Philosophy of Science page discussing "truth" from the standpoint of Einstein, Socrates, Plato, etc.. . It was actually a challenge to find information on relative or absolute "truth" that wasn't biased either religiously or anti-religiously.

Here is a small excerpt from this page:

THE NOTION OF ABSOLUTE TRUTH.
If, by "absolute truth", one means non-relative truth, then the answer is: Yes. Socrates, and his non-relativist followers, would want to say that if a statement such as:
(12) The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second
is true at all, then it is "absolutely" true.

So would Einstein. Indeed, his Theory of Relativity properly understood, asserts that statement (12) is an absolute truth, not a relative one. For it is a consequence of his theory that the speed of light is a constant. That is to say, the speed of light - like the other laws of physics - does not vary between one inertial system and another but is exactly the same within all inertial systems.

Whereas, according to a relativist, the truth of a statement like (12) can vary from person to person according to who utters it, Einstein holds that the truth of (12) is an absolute: it is true (absolutely true) no matter who utters it or in what inertial system they are located.

Any relativists who think they can derive support for their views from Einstein's physical theory, have simply not understood what his theory says.

Even here, the statement about the speed of light as "true" confounds me. Is it a "true" statement or is it "factual?" The speed of light is provable through scientific methodology. It is fact, and the statement is not false because we can prove it is fact, therefore the statement, "The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second," is fact. Is it also true? Is it semantics of language, or is there a difference between fact and truth? And where does that leave us with the unprovable truths? I cannot offer facts that I love, no scientific method regarding the feeling of love. I know I love, therefore it is not false, but it is a truth as I know it to be. Is that not relative? It is at least subjective. It is a mind puzzle to say the least.

I continued on with my quest, but now I was more interested in truth and how it relates to belief or faith, particularly my faith. My beliefs are definitely what I have referred to as personal truths. I can tell you that there are many who would say that my "truths" are incorrect, that they are false. I suppose this is why religion, in its quest for absolute truth, finds itself in a stranglehold over its masses, thus leading to conflict within and outside its boundaries. I came across a writing by Paul Tillich that was written over 50 years ago. His writings are of a nature that incorporate the Absolute, but not in regard to law, to dogma, but rather in Universal love, or God.

But those of us who dare to face the question of truth may listen to what the Fourth Gospel says about it. The first thing which strikes us is that the truth of which Jesus speaks is not a doctrine but a reality, namely, He Himself: "I am the truth." This is a profound transformation of the ordinary meaning of truth. For us, statements are true or false; people may have truth or not; but how can they be truth, even the truth? The truth of which the Fourth Gospel speaks is a true reality—that reality which does not deceive us if we accept it and live with it. If Jesus says, "I am the truth," he indicates that in Him the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present; or, in other words, that God is present, unveiled, undistorted, in His infinite depth, in His unapproachable mystery. Jesus is not the truth because His teachings are true. But His teachings are true because they express the truth which He Himself is. He is more than His words. And He is more than any word said about Him.

The truth which makes us free is neither the teaching of Jesus nor the teaching about Jesus. Those who have called the teaching of Jesus "the truth" have subjected the people to a servitude under the law. And most people like to live under a law. They want to be told what to think and what not to think. And they accept Jesus as the infallible teacher and giver of a new law. But even the words of Jesus, if taken as a law, are not the truth which makes us free. And they should not be used as such by our scholars and preachers and religious teachers. They should not be used as a collection of infallible prescriptions for life and thought. They point to the truth, but they are not a law of truth. Nor are the doctrines about Him the truth that liberates. I say this to you as somebody who all his life has worked for a true expression of the truth which is the Christ. But the more one works, the more one realizes that our expressions, including everything we have learned from our teachers and from the teaching of the Church in all generations, is not the truth that makes us free.

After all of this, I find myself with a better understanding of what I think and believe about truth, but I still have many questions. I don't know if I will fully comprehend "truth" as it relates to the human condition, but I guess that is why the human mind questions and desires to know more, to understand. The soul also seeks truth. Maybe it might be more appropriate to say the soul seeks to live the truth, which for me is love. It is true that my mind and heart often send me opposing signals, but on these matters, I find I am drawn to side with my heart. That truth, my truth, lies with love....absolutely.