Sources of Truth

The best source of truth is the real world.  The more real world evidence that one can find in support of a statement, the more confidence one should have in the truth of that statement.  A statement contradicted by real world evidence is certainly false.

The second best source of truth is your sacred text.  Interpretation of sacred text should be guided by real world evidence.  Statements in your sacred text should be assumed to be true unless shown to be false by real world evidence.

The third best source of truth is your tradition.  One should have more confidence in older traditions than in newer traditions.  Statements in your tradition should be assumed to be true unless shown to be false by real world evidence or shown to conflict with your sacred text.

The worst source of truth is the human mind.  This is the case regardless of whose mind it is or of the means of finding the truth in the mind, whether intuition or deductive logic or claimed divine inspiration.  All statements coming from the mind should be assumed to be false unless shown to be true by real world evidence.

I guess I should also provide justification for this position.  Obviously one can't show that a means of producing truth is true because that requires a means of producing truth to begin with.  So one has to start with an assumption, and my first statement, that the best source of truth is the real world, is an assumption/axiom.  But everything else follows from this.

The most tested statements in history are sacred texts, so they contain the most truth value.  If a sacred text lacks truth, then religions based on it will fail, so successful sacred texts are the long-term result of the survival of the fittest sacred texts.  But different sacred text can contradict each other because they represent different strategies for dealing with life, so you just have to pick the one that fits you the best, and your choice in the one you pick is your second assumption/axiom.

The second most tested statements are those that have been around for a long time, and these are found in traditions.  Old statement that aren't part of traditions failed to become part of a successful culture, so they were not successful.  Statements that were part of successful cultures were tested against history and should be given the benefit of the doubt.

Ideas of the mind have nothing in the real world to support them until they are tested, so they should be considered nothing more than hypotheses.  This is how science works.

But all statements come from a mind and all statements are understood by minds. In my view, we should check any statement for whether it is

1) true

2) logical

3) moral