Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 September 2018
“There are two kinds of truth,” the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, used to tell his students, “small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.”
I suggest it might be helpful to view Christianity and communism as two great truths, in Bohr's sense. The issue between them is not so much one of truth and falsehood as the more comprehensive opposition of the kind exhibited by different philosophies of life, each making claim to man's total allegiance. This opposition ought in fact to be a form of creative collaboration, for the truth never'competes with itself, only with error.