What is Truth?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get too deep - but this picture, taken some time ago (let’s see if anyone knows where it is) caught my eye recently. At the time I saw this one as a challenge and actually wondered if it would work best in Black and White. My reason for thinking that can be seen by what I saw as the distracting number of road surface colours. What a selection! Everything from green to blue, yellow to almost orange - and no, in the daylight they all look the same! …And then there’s the building, what color is it supposed to be?

So what’s going on? Sodium or Mercury vapor lamps contrasting with early LED and Tungsten lamps is of course the cause but which one is “right”?

If you were on the ground in any one of the streets you probably wouldn’t notice the vastly different light that from this hight is so very obvious. Even walking down those “orange” streets at night we’d soon get used to the strange hue everything would have.

One trick from my police days is to ask someone what color a car is and the answer will be “um, I don’t know” if the street was lit by the very orange Sodium Vapor lamps. Not only do the lamps give off a far from true white light but they distort almost all other colours too.

I probably don’t need to go much further do I? “Our” version of “truth” is colored by a number of factors to do with belief, culture, fact and filters. Without absolutes, making a call on right and wrong is as impossible as deciding what shade the street should be, …and without God an absolute is equally impossible.

Today I’ve intentionally chosen a picture with colourful colors and chosen to spell that both “right” ways. See?

…and if we can’t sort THAT out, how do we expect to answer the bigger issues without divine intervention.

Thank God for absolutes.