Starseyer

I've heard many conservative Christians say that the modern culture in America (and many other places) does not believe in something they call "absolute truth". (Mostly this is in reference to morals and such, and this is why I decided to put the post under the Moral Foundations topic.) When I sift through what they say I get the idea that what they really mean is that modern (postmodern?) culture does not believe that Christianity is absolute truth, and therefore they do not believe anything is absolute.

I've never heard anyone really define "absolute truth" beyond just that it is supposedly contained in the bible. So for the sake of discussion, what do you think "absolute truth" really is, and do you believe in it?

Godless Dave

"Absolute truth" to me means something that exists whether or not there is anyone there to observe it. For example, the earth revolves around the sun. The earth's oceans contain salt water. Those are "absolute truths".

Starseyer

I agree. If something is to be held up as absolute truth, it had better be objective. But then, is there anything objective about morality? Or is it a matter of oppinion or culture, "all relative" in other words?

(maybe this does belong in the philosophy thread after all. Tough call)

Tired Runner

I think always (in modern times), people's morals will be subjective. Of course you'll have a couple people with similar morals, but typically it's subjective.

And to your first paragraph, Starseyer, many people (er, in Canada, but I imagine US would be similar, just somewhat more advanced and a lot more people ) don't believe in an absolute truth, and of course you'll have people who don't believe Christianity is worth following. Or any religion, for that matter.

I'd be interested in reading what other people define as absolute truth.

And yes, there is an absolute truth defined in the Bible. A few, if not just one. People, however, who read it generally compare it to what they thing is right...going back to subjective morals...

Um, this is probably a dumb question, but if no one was around to see the planets rotating around the Sun, would they still be rotating?

Zora

So, Tired Runner,

What "absolute truths" are there in the Bible? I am curious, because I asked a theist friend a similar question about "religious truths." (She said there were many. I said name one. She gave a couple examples, which we discussed, only to find....what a shock....that they were subjective, not absolute.)

So, can you name a couple from the Bible for me??

Grad Student Humanist

What's irritating about Xtians and absolute values is that it's based completely on the authority of the Bible. The Bible tells us what God wants and what he allows and what we're supposed to do and it's the right thing to do because God said it. The God of the Bible is posited as the bearer of the "absolute truths" which are revealed in the Bible. Of course, nobody can prove that God exists or that the Bible is inerrant so it's all academic.

I believe there are some absolute truths about life, like the fact that everyone dies, sooner or later. And I also think there are unknowable truths like what happens when you die. But I don't believe that there are any absolute truths that have been given to man by an objective source of morality.

seebs

I think it is quite possible that there exist absolute moral truths, but I'm not sure whether or not we can be sure we've recognized them. In science, at least you can perform tests. Philosophy denies you that.

Vandrare

i'm afraid im not a philosophy student, but from what i've read this may be relating to antifoundationalism (which i thought developed in america). this pretty much says you can't define absolute truths, but that everything is determined by personal experience and that knowledge is constantly changing with time.
anyway, here's a link about it that will explain better than i ever could....

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/gallery/rh...oundation.html

:-D Anna

soulofdarwin

I absolutely believe in the "absolute truth". Nobel Laureate particle physicist Steven Weinberg has summed up the matter quite nicely, I think, in the following anecdote:

“For some years I have been wrangling about reductionism with a good friend, the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who among other things gave us our best working definition of a biological species. It started when, in a 1985 article, he pounced on a line in a ‘Scientific American’ article (on other matters) that I had written in 1974. In this article I had mentioned that in physics we hope to find a few simple general laws that would explain why nature is the way it is and that at present the closest we can come to a unified view of nature is a description of elementary particles and their mutual interactions. Mayr in his article called this ‘a horrible example of the way physicists think’ and referred to me as ‘an uncompromising reductionist’. I responded in an article in ‘Nature’ that I am not an uncompromising reductionist; I am a compromising reductionist. . . .

As far as I can understand it, Mayr distinguishes three kinds of reductionism: constitutive reductionism (or ontological reductionism, or analysis), which is a method of studying objects by inquiring into their basic constituents; theory reductionism, which is the explanation of a whole theory in terms of a more inclusive theory; and explanatory reductionism, which is the view ‘that the mere knowledge of its ultimate components would be sufficient to explain a complex system’. The main reason I reject this categorization is that none of these categories has much to do with what I am talking about (though I suppose theory reductionism comes closest). Each of these three categories is defined by what scientists actually do or have done or could do; I am talking about nature itself. For instance, even though physicists cannot actually explain the properties of very complicated molecules like DNA in terms of the quantum mechanics of electrons, nuclei, and electric forces, and even though chemistry survives to deal with such problems with its own language and concepts, still there are no autonomous principles of chemistry that are simply independent truths, not resting on deeper principles of physics.� [pp. 53-54, ‘Dreams of a Final Theory’]

So, reductionism relates to order in nature (as opposed to reductionism as a prescription for progress in science - a view to which Weinberg does not subscribe).

Further, there are no autonomous laws of nature other than a relatively few fundamental laws. That is to say that nature is described by a hierarchy of explanations, each resting on a more fundamental explanation and ultimately converging on the fundamental laws of nature, for which there are no further explanations. Or, more simply put, the reality of everything is there. It remains only for us to see it. That hierarchy of explanation is the only absolute truth extant in this universe.

99Percent

In the strictest absolute sense, it is impossible to know whether absolute moral truths exists, because that would require omniscience and/or omnibenevolence, which are logically impossible.

However, in the human realm of understanding and knowledge I think it is perfectly reasonable to assume we can derive absolute moral truths, because we can communicate perfectly with conceptual knowledge. We both know what a tree is, what the number nine means, etc, even though in the absolute sense such concepts don't exist purely.

Likewise the concept of good and evil exists and are understandable within our human realm of knowledge. We can objectively see what is good and what is evil, and even explain it perfectly, even though in the strictests absolute sense, ie, beyond our human realm, good and evil cannot be completely determined.

For example, we both know that total extermination of humanity (say by nuclear war) is completely evil, yet in a more greater sense, maybe that would be a good thing, if it allowed for example a new more advanced species to take over the world instead. But that is irrelevant because it goes beyond our realm of human understanding and existence.