Truth is one of the most exulted ideals humans know. We have a natural thirst to know the truth. We place and withdraw trust from others based on whether they tell us the truth. Even young children love the truth; lying to a child causes them to throw a tantarum, as any adult by now should know. Universally, truth is a cherished and revered thing for humankind.
Seeing that it is this important, the pursuit of truth is naturally one of the biggest drives behind most of humanity's activities. We always wanted to get to the bottom of everything. Always sought the truth. However, truth is dear to come by. It is not easy to find it.
For centuries, we failed to get the truth. And because we valued it too much, we tended to accept any available version of it, distorted and twisted though it may be. That is why many primitive societies paid a lot of attention, and resources, to people like the shamans, who clearly did not contribute that much to their societies. For a hunter-gatherer to give a piece of his hunt in sacrifice to that person, it must have been a great loss that can only be accepted in case the shaman gave something in return. Obviously, that thing the shaman had was a claim to know the truth.
Now, not all truths are equal. There are, in fact, many different layers of truth. One layer, which the shamans gave, is the personal truth. That is, the truth that one believes to be true themselves, and thus consider as real truth. In other words, it is the truth according to belief. Personal belief. That is a kind of truth that we still are familiar with today. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and all the other groups of believers, have their own personal version of truth. These are valid, alright. But only once you believe them yourself. They cannot be universal since there aren't outside indicators of their validity. That is why there are personal truths.
Another layer of truth would be political truth. This type of truth is one that is espoused by the followers of a certain leader or political ideology. You can see many different version of this today, across the globe. From the Neo-Ottomanists in Turkey, who think Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a new incarnation of the Ottoman Caliphs, to the MAGA Republicans in the United States who believe Donald J. Trump to be the Jesus-incarnate saviour they need to give them salvation. In both these cases, the beliefs are patently false to the outsider, but those holding those beliefs simply refuse to follow the evidence. They would not be convinced of their beliefs' falsehood. Because they want them to be true for their own sake. Their politics will crumble if these pillars are overturned.
The ultimate layer of truth, absolute truth, is the one that all can agree upon. Regardless of who you are, what you believe, what faction to feel you belong to, these truths should hold true to you. But how can this type of truth be reached? Here, humanity developed a great method. This method is called the scientific method.
The scientific method is a set of measures and steps one takes to reach an absolute truth about a certain subject. Now, you shouldn't expect absolute here to be used in the literal sense; absolute truth denotes one that is valid regardless of the person telling or observing it. It can be changed with time in light of new evidence, but will remain true regardless of who believes and who denies it. For example, the issue of climate change is an absolute truth. You cannot invalidate climate change by disbelieving it. You cannot say that it is a personal or political issue. Why? Because, unlike those kinds of truth, this is an truth that has independent verification through experiments. Repetitive tests and observations. Science, simply, can be defined as the disciplined and structured pursuit of absolute truths. That is why science is the greatest human achievement.