Breaking! Government of Canada states that Truth is objective.

When I first seen this commercial I was blown away by its message; especially as it was coming from the Government of Canada.

"Creativity is subjective. The truth isn't."

What a powerful statement.

Truth is not subjective. That being the case, truth must be objective.

Truth is objective.

What's the difference?

Well, subjective truth is rooted in the subject, while objective truth is rooted in the object. An illustration is helpful to understand the difference. You are wandering around a mall with a friend and come upon a stand that is offering a taste test in order to determine which is better, chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream. You try both flavors and say that chocolate ice cream is better. Your friend tries both flavors and says that vanilla is the better flavor. Well which is it? Both.

In this scenario, the ice cream is the object under investigation and the two friends are the subjects. For you, chocolate ice cream is the best flavor and that is true for you, but not true for your friend who chose vanilla. To be subjectively true, something is true for you, but not necessarily true for anyone else.

What is objectively true in this scenario, is not the better flavor of ice cream, but rather that what you were tasting was indeed ice cream. You could believe with all your might that it was salad, but that would not make it true. Ice cream is ice cream regardless of what you believe about it because the truth of it is rooted in the ice cream itself and not in your personal belief.

Brett Kunkle puts it this way:

[A] statement is true when it matches up with the way the world really is. The ancient philosopher Aristotle captured the idea of correspondence this way: “If you say that it is and it is, or you say that it isn’t and it isn’t, that’s true. If you say that it isn’t and it is, or you say that it is and it isn’t, that’s false.”

[...]

On this view, is reality a matter of your subjective opinion? In other words, does reality depend on what you believe? Absolutely not. Reality is what we call an objective fact. It exists independent of what anyone believes or thinks. It is not relative to our beliefs but indifferent to our beliefs. And since truth is grounded in reality, truth itself is objective. The truth of reality does not change based upon your beliefs or mine. 

Video courtesy of The One Minute Apologist, featuring Dr. Norm Geisler.

Today our culture is rife with examples of people who profess and believe things that may be subjectively true for them, but insist that what they believe is actually an objective truth that everyone must accept. A person's gender is based on biology (xx = female, xy = male), yet there are many today that would say what a person feels, or believes about themselves (a subjective truth) is something that is actually an objective truth and must be given ascent by the masses despite what reality is telling us.

This is only one aspect of the why understanding what truth actually is matters. When we hold to the idea that subjective truth is the same as or equal to objective truth, or that all truth is simply subjective we do ourselves and each other great harm.

Which causes me to ask the question, if the government of Canada says that truth is objective, then why does it insist that its citizens accept subjective truth in its place?

When we do this, we deny reality and reality has a way of winning out in the end. Sometimes in the most painful of ways.