In the 19th century, Copernicus, Newton, Galilei et al pushed a revolutionary new idea that reshaped the way we think… but no, it’s not talking about cosmology, but about theology.

This idea, (which was also the real reason they were in so much trouble with the church) is the assumption that “people are capable of acquiring knowledge by observation and reason”.

Important to know that those thinkers weren’t against the church, they were deeply religious, deeply Christian. Newton famously said that “gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.” He didn’t say, as some people later said, that physics proves that God doesn’t exist. But a human producing a theory explaining a phenomenon was revolutionary enough.

You see, religious doctrines, and Christianity in particular, renders God as the only source of knowledge. God is the creator of truth, so everything that they say is true (about time to start using they/them pronouns for God). And human beings, on the other hand, have flawed minds, and their thoughts must also be flawed.

Also, (this is specific to Christianity) God send their son to Earth and he told us all we need to know about how to live our lives. So, all we can do is to analyze and understand better what he said. Any other inquiry is useless. Contrast this with Greek philosophers, for example, who weren’t instructed by their Gods on what is good and what is bad, so they could, and as philosophers they had to, pounder about things themselves.

This was a preamble for the real question: the difference between “true” and “correct”, which is often ignored.

We can say that Newton’s mechanics is “correct” — it yields accurate predictions, can be used for constructing buildings, for example etc. or that Einstein’s theory of relativity is “more correct” than Newton’s. But neither Newton’s nor Einstein’s theories are “true”. No scientific theory is “true”. True is a different level than “correct”. The question of what is correct can be answered by measurement. The question what is true involves faith.

One seeming difference is that you can “prove” that a given theory is correct while truth rests on our flawed (according to religious and scientific thinkers alike) judgement. However, any such proof would rests on axioms that is to say, on truths.

And even if this wasn’t the case, true and correct operate on different levels: when your goal is truth a mere correctness will not be enough for you. So, we should not dedicate our lives to pursue “correctness” when it is truth that we are after.