Suppose that you’re talking with a couple of friends about whether one survives biological death. Your view is that humans are purely physical creatures, which means that there is no non-physical soul or any other part of us that is capable of surviving the death of our physical bodies. As you see it, when someone’s physical body dies, they die, and that’s it.

Your friend Anvi has a different view, which is rooted in Hinduism. Her view is that, ultimately, each human is atman, a genuine self or soul. Atman, she holds, is reborn into different sorts of physical bodies depending on a person’s karma during their lifetime. Eventually, atman can be liberated from this cycle of rebirth. If it is, atman is realised in brahman and attains moksha, the ultimate state of enlightenment and liberation.

Your other friend, Ethan, is a Catholic. His view is that each human has a non-physical soul that survives the death of their physical body and is then reunited with that body on Judgement Day. Unlike Anvi, Ethan doesn’t think that souls can be reincarnated and, unlike you, he doesn’t believe biological death is the end of our existence. Rather, he believes that there is only one body that each soul can inhabit and that, after death, a person’s soul will ultimately inhabit the same body that it inhabited on Earth.

Overhearing the disagreement, your friend Josh interjects, asking you, Anvi and Ethan why you think that your views about surviving death are true. You say that, based on current scientific evidence, you think your view represents the way the world is: humans are purely physical, and that means that death is final. Anvi explains that she thinks her view is true because it fits well with the other views that she holds: if she gave up her view about death, then her overall worldview would be less coherent. Ethan says that he thinks his view is true because holding this view has helped generations of Catholics (as well as Protestants, Jews and Muslims) to live spiritually satisfying lives: a view that works this well must have something going for it.

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The disagreement between you, Anvi and Ethan is likely to turn on a number of factors, including your cultural backgrounds and what gives each of you a sense of meaning as you progress through life. Even so, Josh’s interjection brings out an important fact: your answers to questions about immortality are affected by your background views on what it takes for statements of religious conviction to be true or false. When this becomes apparent to you, Anvi and Ethan, it raises a further question: what does it take for a statement of religious conviction to be true, rather than false? This is a challenging question, of course, and addressing it will require some careful thought about truth.

In this Guide, we’ll cover five ideas about truth that you should consider if you want to think about this topic in a philosophically informed way. Philosophers have wrestled with questions about of truth for a long time. Debates about truth have occurred, and continue to occur, in philosophical traditions from all over the world. They impact many other philosophical debates, and they also intersect in fascinating ways with contemporary scientific research. Understanding philosophical ideas about truth won’t necessarily provide you with a straightforward recipe for how to arrive at true beliefs. It will, however, help you to think more clearly about humans’ relationship to the world that we inhabit, the commonalities and differences in our ways of representing the world, and why it matters whether our beliefs are true or false.

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