Why is truth so valuable? It enables you to deal with reality successfully.

• Truth is accuracy of representation. You know something if you’re able to represent it as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.
• Reality is what you run into when you’re wrong. Simply believing something doesn’t make it true or false. 
• Jesus is completely on the side of truth in all things.
• Jesus's saying that the truth shall make you free (John 8:31-32) in its proper context is still true today and testable in life.

The Bitterness of Truth:

• Truth does not adjust itself to our wishes, beliefs or choices. It is utterly relentless.
• No one has ever made a belief true by believing it. Belief is relative to individuals and groups, but not truth.

Knowledge of Truth:

• Confers the right (and responsibility) to act, to direct action, to formulate and supervise policy, and to teach.
• Is "politically" powerful and claims to it are dangerous.
• People reject knowledge and truth because it restricts their freedom and does not suit their feelings. It tells them they are not in charge and must submit to those who know.

Character is the Issue:

• Our human challenge is to master desire on behalf of what is good and right.
• The case of Cain: "Sin's desire is for you, but you must mater it." (Genesis 4:7)
• God's plan for each of us is that we should grow to the point where He can empower us to do what we want.

The University's Answers to Life's Great Questions:

• All great teachers must answer the Four Great Questions:
  1. What is reality.
  2. Who is well off?
  3. Who is a really good person?
  4. How can one become a really good person.
• Jesus's answers to these questions informed traditional university life.
• The university is not equipped to answer the great questions now, or to deal with them honestly. (A. T. Kronman) It has no resources to deal with them.
• Is more interested in human respectability than in truth. Truth is an embarrassment. “Research” is all. Defined by social pressure.

The Task of God's People

• Resist the secular definitions of "knowledge" that make knowledge Godless.
• Present Jesus's answers to the Big Questions as knowledge in the sense explained here.
• Stand as teachers of the nations, bringing knowledge to life.

The students organizing this event chose a theme that questioned the relevance of the university system’s original vision and goals in comparison with its current approach. This gave Dallas an opportunity to talk about a topic that had risen to the forefront of his teaching during the last 15 years of his life: The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. 

"The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge" means the institutions of knowledge in our society no longer provide moral knowledge—as such.

The Moral Life of Course Goes On

• Moral sentiments, beliefs, and traditions carry on. 
• Bitter moral opprobrium flows, a culture of moral contempt.
• The peculiar kind of distancing, rejection and scorn that goes with moral opprobrium.
• But when challenged, it is treated as political.
• People still make choices!
• The case presented by Robert Coles in his “The Disparity Between Intellect and Character” —people who make “A”s in ethics courses but treat their classmates despicably.
• Coles’ diagnosis in terms of a disconnect between the intellect and action.

Why Can’t We Teach What Is Right and Wrong?

• There is no knowledge of right and wrong?  At best an unproven assumption.
• The teacher would subvert the student’s intellect? Communicate their own bias? No more than in any subject.
• We must be pluralistic? Why? Is that a moral demand? Does pluralism mean that everyone is equally right, or that no one is wrong in moral opinion and practice?

Actually We Do Teach Right and Wrong

• By body language, looks, word emphasis, what we choose to talk about and not.
• The well-known “hidden curriculum
• It is impossible for adults in authority not to communicate their moral values.
• Doing so responsibly would be to critically and thoroughly show the weight of evidence for the rightness and wrongness of kinds of actions, and for the goodness and badness of character traits and persons.

The Ethics of Jesus

• To love god with all your being and your neigh-bor as yourself.
• Love acts for the well-being of those affected. Including oneself.
• The moral basis of justice is love.
• Statement by Habermas.
• No plausible alternative to the ethic of Jesus has ever been given.
• What is remarkable is not just the content of his teaching, but that he enables us to actually do the things that are right and to do them from the heart: as natural expressions of who we are.

The Truth Will Set You Free

• Written on more university walls than any other saying.
• The meaning of the full statement. Moral truth.
• Deliverance from the practice of evil.
• Through dwelling in the kingdom of God.

Responsible Intellect vs Moral Shallowness

• People of intellect and erudition today blindly reject the person and teachings of Jesus. They do not give serious consideration to him, but live in prejudice. 
• Responsible intellect will test the truth about Jesus and the truth of his teachings.
• The moral teachings blindly conveyed by the practice of the contemporary university imperils the lives of individuals, and undermines the moral foundations of institutions.

Recommended Reading: 

The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality, by Julie Reuben.
“The Disparity Between Intellect and Character,” by Robert Coles. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol 42, #4 (Sept 1995).
“The Aims of Education,” by John J. Mearsheimer. Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 22, #1 (April 1998)