Absolute Truth and God

Great Debates
1

So in a facebook conversation the other day about truth, science, and the like, I had this exchange:

(Yes, it’s that kind of discussion.)

But this is actually getting under my skin. I’m curious of two things, mainly:

  1. Is the existence of absolute truth a widely accepted philosophical position?
  2. Is the claim that absolute truth can only be defined by a god tenable? Or even coherent?

My response was something along the lines of “Why call that ‘god’ if your sole defining characteristic is ‘defines absolute truth’?” But I’m not sure if I’m satisfied with that.

2

It’s a circular argument. What proves the existence of God? The existence of absolute truth. What defines absolute truth? God. Your friend is begging the question.

Or you could just ask him or her the question that lead me, and so many other skeptics, into nonbelief: “Do you have any evidence?”

3

I remember an old essay by Martin Gardner, where he spoke of two approaches in philosophy to “truth.”

The more conventional idea is that there is such a thing as truth, and that we can know some of it. We can approach it. Maybe we can’t know all of it, but, as an ideal, it exists. Think of it as a scrap of paper with the Real Answers written on it: it might be somewhere we’ll never find it, but it exists.

The other idea was that there isn’t such a scrap of paper at all. There is no “truth.” It doesn’t exist in any real sense. We can still accumulate knowledge, do science, and so on, but we’re only building up conceptual structures of our own creation, not encountering the “real” truth.

The former is much more widely held. Someone once said that science is an asymptotic approach to the truth: every advance gets us closer to it.

(Isaac Asimov said something similar in “The Relativity of Wrong.” We used to believe the world was flat. Then that it was a sphere. Then that it was an oblate spheroid. These days, we think it has some largish bulges that deform it from perfect oblate-sphericity. Each of these ideas is wrong, but each of these ideas is slightly less wrong than the idea preceding it.)

Meanwhile, your correspondent is engaging in a variant of the “ontological argument.” This classically holds that God is defined as “perfect,” and a “perfect” entity would have no flaws. Not existing is a flaw. Ergo, God must exist.

There might be such a thing as Absolute Truth…and yet there might very well be no God to “define” it. Absolute Truth might exist, but never be “defined.” The argument that God must exist to define it is mere linguistic masturbation. It’s almost as foolish as the argument that, since there are “laws of nature,” there must be a “lawgiver.”

He is right that there is no “Absolute Certainty” in atheism. He’s just wrong in imagining that there is Absolute Certainty in any other idea. There isn’t. His faith is based on…faith. He’s welcome to it, but it’s hubris for him to claim it’s “certain.”

4

For a philosopher, the question of whether absolute truth exists is different from the question of whether any human can know the absolute truth. Any philosopher knows the arguments from Berkeley and Hume and others: we could all be living in something like ‘the Matrix’; it could be all our sense perceptions are created by an evil and all-powerful being to deceive us; it could be that everything I remember is part of a dream or hallucination. So in a philosophical sense, no one can ever be absolutely, positively, totally certain about anything that relies on data from the senses. Despite this, most of us don’t worry about solipsistic arguments and simply live as if the issue doesn’t bother us.

And indeed there’s no reason why those sorts of arguments should bother us. However, as I see it, when choosing to reject the “maybe it’s a dream” line of thinking, we are all making a leap of faith, in the sense that Kierkegaard understood it. Thus everyone takes something on faith.

5

What type of absolute truth is being discussed? I can think of scientific truths, about the physical world, and philosophical truths.

For the former we can never have absolute truth, thanks to Heisenberg. We can approximate it, and so far science without god has done far better than god-based approaches.

I think an argument can be made that there are no absolute philosophical truths. In any case religion has not done a good job in finding even approximations to them.
So a response might be, even if there are absolute truths, the god and religion you believe in have no clue about them. Thus you cannot be backing the right god.

6

Science deals with data and facts, not “truth”. Truth lies in the realm of philosophy.

But the OP’s friend is correct about one thing. The HARD ATHEIST position is not scientific, as it states that God does not exist. In truth (hah!) we don’t know. The agnostic position is the scientific one-- no evidence exists, and so we we hypothesize that God does not exist. But we don’t know for sure. Practically, though, it’s the same thing.

7

It is circular, but besides that, ask your friend "even if I accept your premise, and there is some sort of god, someone who created the universe - how do you know about him? How do you know he’s a bearded guy in the sky who hates gay people and commands you to wear funny hats and tells you only to wear blue on tuesdays?

Even if you were to somehow prove the existance of a creator, I don’t know how people can jump to the conclusion of “see, there’s some sort of creator, therefore he’s the blue on tuesday god!”

I also think the “hard atheist” view is a bit of a strawman. “There is no god” almost never means “I know all there is to know, and I can say definitively that there is no god”, it generally means “your idea of god has about as much going for it as leprechauns or the teapots orbiting saturn, so I’m going to regard them similarly”

It’s funny that when people say “there’s no such thing as leprechauns” we don’t get into a 4 hour argument about the philosophy of what truth is, and how arrogant someone is for thinking they know so much about reality that they can deny leprechauns.

8

I’d call myself a “firm” atheist. I wouldn’t say “There is no God,” but I’d say “I have absolutely no reason to believe in a God.”

9

There is the famous exchange in the Bible:

Basically in this statement and others those on this world can not know truth, and Pilate demonstrates this here and it is seen that knowing truth does involve some level of transcendence, which other statements of Jesus indicate he has overcome the world and not of this world.

The transcendence is needed for truth can not be know in this world, however most forms of atheism take a more or less non-transcending form (Buddhism for one excluded) so can not know truth. This also applies to religious, just following the rituals theists.

10

The classic problem with any proof for “god”: the god you’re trying to prove does not have anything to do with the god you believe in.

But if there is no truth, how can we make statements about anything? From what I understand, “There is no absolute truth” is a bit of a paradoxical statement, as it cannot be true. Or am I missing something here?

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense.

FWIW, this was my response:

11

Or he’s lying – or a lunatic! – or any one of a number of other possibilities, really.

(I mean, anyone can state that Nobody Else Knows The Truth – but I’ve OVERCOME the world! And am not OF this world! And have a some-level-of-transcendence direct pipeline to TRUTH! And making those statements – doesn’t make them true.)

12

I guess some people on this board have never heard of mathematics.

13

Anyone claiming absolute certainty is deluding themself - even if absolute truth exists, the human capacity to understand things is still a weak link in the chain.

14

Creating something from nothing is usually what we refer to as magic. I think I read somewhere on here last week that if all the empty space was removed from everything in the universe we could fit the universe into a paint bucket. Thats about as close as you can get to creating something from nothing. Until a better explanation comes along I have to see that as evidence of something supernatural.

15

Your post demonstrates in the very least that that some level of ‘leaving this world’ is needed for knowing truth, either from transcending or from tuning out via being a lunatic.

And also casts much doubt on being able to know truth without such ability to leave the world.

In all due respect your use of the word ‘pipeline’ goes against your ability to be able to meaningfully post here. The truth comes from a foundation of knowing who we are, it is not a pipeline, but a inner knowing.

16

No, it doesn’t.

In everyday parlance, I of course know the truth about rather a lot of things – sure as people tell me stuff, and I routinely find out whether they were lying or, y’know, telling the truth – and I don’t do it by ‘leaving this world’, I don’t do it by transcending or being a lunatic, but by utterly mundane means.

Imagine I meet a wild-eyed weirdo who makes a claim about the coin in my hand and says he knows the truth not by mundane means, but by having transcended the world. And I meet a second wild-eyed weirdo who (a) makes a different claim, and (b) says that guy is lying; I know the truth, by dint of having transcended the world. And I also meet a third guy who offers up a different claim and says they’re both mistaken; he says he knows, because he’s transcended the world.

And then a fourth guy pops in with a claim of his own, explaining that all three of them are incorrect – which he knows because he transcended the world.

Which one, if any, is telling the truth? I won’t test their claims by leaving the world; but, if possible, I’ll mundanely learn the truth, with no transcendence needed.

17

I don’t completely get the viewpoint myself, but I think those who say there is “no such thing as truth” are willing to allow smaller, low-level, operational and functional “small-t truth.” I like anchovies on my pizza: that’s true. But it doesn’t really say anything about the nature of big-T Truth. It’s only a localized human construct.

It may be tied up with postmodernism, which says (sort of) We can never look at the world except through the colored lenses of our social upbringing. We can never see “The Truth” because we cannot escape projecting something of our own viewpoint upon it.

Seriously, I’m guessing. I’m much more of an old-fashioned evidence-based logical empiricist. “How can this proposition be tested?”

I think there is some value to a weak version of the postmodernist principle: our cultural viewpoint does, in fact, color much of our perception of the world. The weak version of the linguistic-determinist principle is also of some value: the language we speak influences our perception of reality.

The “strong” versions of these principles are, in my opinion, too strong and too exclusionary.

18

Established religions (attempt to) serve the function of eliminating uncertainty. We humans aren’t fond of uncertainty, especially on the big questions.

There is, however, no cure for uncertainty, and the only vaid approach to spiritual understanding is to embrace uncertainty—mine, yours, everyone’s— and interact with all other people with the perspective that comes from understanding that none of us can possess certainty, that any of us, no matter how confident, might be wrong.

19

Given that in my next sentence I wrote

your comment is pointless. Truths are not the same thing as hard facts.

Lucky for us that I’ve known about 1 person in over 30 years of posting who thinks this. The hard atheist position is that we believe there is no God, not that we know it. Given the fuzzy definition of God and the big universe, your hard atheist definition is nonsense on the face of it. Don’t encourage the theists, please.

20

No, he’s right: there really are “hard atheists” who insist that there most certainly is no God.

I’m one of them…for certain definitions of God. I believe, with a great deal of firmness, that there is no “omniscient” entity, and that there is no “omnipotent” entity. I hold these terms to be self-contradictory. An entity can no more exist having either of these qualities than a square triangle can exist…or an invisible pink unicorn.

There are actually a great many different kinds of atheists, occupying a broad spectrum of personal certainty, from those who have vague doubts to those who are entirely sure.