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Good Morning. Yesterday, on this programme, an employee of Belarus’ national TV channel, Katia. explained why she had just resigned: ‘I couldn’t allow myself to be an employee of an organisation that doesn’t tell the truth’, she said. Like Katia, I am also worried about truth. I don’t mean the recurrent, scholarly and comfortable debates about whether truth is something real or something constructed, absolute or relative, important though that discussion is, but about the current danger of letting a high value put on truth slip from our grasp. For without truth, people grope about in the dark, unaware of danger, unconscious of need. This same week, Cai Xia, former professor at China’s elite Central Party School, just expelled from the Party for speaking out, has said of its leader: ‘Since people don’t tell him the truth or hide it from him, he doesn’t necessarily know the truth. So it is inevitable that he will make wrong decisions.’ Lest anyone complacently think that such devaluing of, and hiding from, truth, with the consequent risk of making disastrous decisions, is a problem only for other countries, think a moment about the recent growth of ‘fact-checking’ services, or of newspaper front-page falsities followed by footnote corrections. Or of the continued promotion of false statements about vaccines and climate change that hurt and even kill people, and threaten to do the same to our planet. One of the many things that my professional scientific community and my Christian tradition have in common, is an insistence that truth matters, and holding one another to account for it. In science, truth comes far above reputation, seniority, acclaim – it is the search for true knowledge about the world that drives science on. And it’s extraordinary, in the Gospels, how often Jesus prefaces his core message statements with the words Amen lego – ‘I tell you the truth’. The early church followed suit, writing about the opposition of truth and wickedness, and the need for the new 1st-century communities of Jesus’ followers to ‘speak the truth in love’ with each other. And when Jesus finally stood face to face with Pontius Pilate, he challenges the Roman ruler over the issue of truth. Pilate, ever the politician, replies, ‘what is the truth?’ But doesn’t wait for the answer. Both science and faith promote a high public value of truth, because without truth no one can make good decisions, people suffer; and only under truth can people flourish and be truly free.