Discussing the fundamental roots of epistemology and finding out why religious apologists' understanding of the word "truth" is misguided
"The only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths." - Paul Feyerabend
We love to do debates all the time, whether it's formal or not. Some do it in their schools as their project, some do it in a casual discussion, some do it publicly. We love to argue about almost anything, from the most mundane to the most controversial. Is DC better than Marvel? Does pineapple belongs to the pizza? or how about, can we allow same-sex marriage? Is Marcos a good or a bad president? Or how about this, does God exist? If there is one exasperating facet of contemporary debates that I can mention, it's the openly adversarial nature of it that it all seems to operate. Because instead of working together to build a better understanding of our universe, we are seeing interlocutors on opposing sides arguing for the sake of scoring philosophical points. It's like two lawyers of the defendant and the victim dogmatically arguing on behalf of their clients' best interest in the front of the jury. The reason why modern philosophical debates seem to be meaningless and unproductive is because they cannot even agree on what epistemic rules that they are using. It's like playing a game of chess where the opponent thinks that they are playing checkers. I mean, how can we agree on what is true or not if we cannot even agree on what truth really means?
Defining the word "truth"
It's important to keep in mind that the debate over the existence of God is more than just a casual academic argument but a philosophical battle over the very rules of epistemology itself. Because if you can corrupt the entire understanding of someone's mind over what the word "truth" really means, then it will be a matter of time for them to be easily persuaded to any nonsensical ideas and crazy bullshit, and if we cannot have a formal agreement on what truth actually means, then there's simply no way for us to have a productive discussion and there's just no point to try arguing over what is true or not in the first place. In this essay, we will dig down to the very bedrock of epistemology itself, work to construct a reliable functional understanding of it, and try to understand and criticize the perception of Christian apologists about knowledge. Up to this point, stop right there and ask yourself this question: What is truth? I mean, really, what is truth? What does that word mean? And especially, what does it not mean? Let's dig deeper and analyze some definitions here.
When it comes to defining truth, I think most of us have a simple idea about what it means and it generally sounds like this: truth is that which corresponds with reality, and it is known as the Correspondence Theory of Truth (1). True propositions corresponds with reality while false ones don't. For example, consider the proposition "I live in the Philippines." Well, it happens that I indeed live in the Philippines so "It is true that I live in the Philippines." At first glance, this definition of truth seems to fit our natural intuitions about the world, and looks like a sensible definition. Or is it? One fundamental problem that many people seem to overlook about this definition of truth is that: How the heck can I objectively determine if a claim really does correspond with reality? It's not just a trivial question and it's kind of a big deal. I mean, what if I'm just lying to you and I'm writing this essay somewhere in South Korea? Or what if I'm actually on the moon? You cannot prove that I'm not there, can you? Or maybe, what if there's really no such thing as Philippines at all, and you're just in a transcendental dream-like realm somewhere in space-time, or you're just a brain-in-a-vat plugged into some kind of matrix simulation? Let's take another example: "The moon is round." What if there's just some kind of optical illusion in the atmosphere that makes square things look round? What if it's just a hologram (like some conspiracy theorists believe) or just a giant photograph of the moon? Or what if I'm just into a hallucinatory drug, or perhaps a lucid dream? Or what if I'm just being tricked by the Norse god of mischief Loki? I don't know, and the even sadder thing about that is we simply cannot know it for certain.
Why we can't actually know everything for certain?
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." - Voltaire
No matter what you think about the truth of the subject matter, there will always be a room for philosophical doubt. As far as we can tell, we're just a sentient agent that experiences a continuous flow of sensory information, having a finite, limited capacity of cognitive functioning. Objective absolute understanding of reality is simply not accessible. This problem is known as the external world skepticism or Cartesian skepticism (2). That is to say, there really maybe some objective reality out there beyond our sensory perception, but unfortunately, we cannot know it with absolute certainty. We simply cannot ignore the enormous difference between reality, our perception of reality, and the linguistic framework that we use to describe that reality. So therefore, I want to conclude that the Correspondence Theory of Truth is meaningless and because it defines truth in terms of something that cannot be measured or verified at all. It does not answer the question that we are seeking, and it pushes back truth into some uncertain realm that cannot be known with certainty. I mean, what's the point of arguing anything at all if the very thing that we need to prove ourselves correct is forever beyond anybody's reach? Remember that there is no such thing as "correct" definition, there are only "good" definitions (precise, intuitive, functional, meaningful) and "bad" definitions (obtuse, unverifiable, useless, ambiguous). My point is, it's a bad definition and we need to replace it with a much more workable and functional one.
Let's talk about some definitions
But there is hope. Just because a perfect perception of objective reality is beyond our reach, does not mean we should not at least try to formulate something that works. We just need to be very clear what exactly truth entails and what exactly we intend to measure truth whenever we see it. So let's make some reasonable definitions here in order for us to find where the confusion comes from. Let's begin with the word
Reality: the entirety of existence itself or the collection of everything that is real.
Now let's break down reality into two sub-categories. The first one is
Internal reality or subjective reality: the immediate internal awareness of sensory perception.
Examples are your memory, your senses like vision or taste, and your emotional states. The second one is
External reality or objective reality: everything that is beyond of our sensory perception.
We all like to have an immediate awareness of the universe as well, but we don't because nature has not given us that capacity. Therefore, our goal is to create some convention that at least allows us to speak about this realm as coherent as possible, and we do that in form of verbal attempts of making propositions.
Let's now define
Proposition: a linguistic attempt of describing reality, or simply, a claim or an assertion of fact, like "All bachelors are unmarried" or "Water's boiling point is 100 degrees Celsius" or "My plates are broken."
Then we're going to define
Truth: a label that is given to a proposition in accordance with an epistemology.
This may not be what people generally think about the definition of truth, but all I want to say is that we need to draw a distinction between the actual state of affairs/external reality and our mental ability to describe and understand it.
Now let's define
Epistemology, and although it is colloquially defined as the study of knowledge, but let's narrow it down as the set of rules that measures how well a given proposition corresponds with reality.
Think of it as a yardstick that measures the truthiness of a proposition, or a box where you put an input (linguistic proposition), then an algorithm in accordance to some rules applies, then an output comes out with a label of either true or false. Later on, we will elaborate the discussion about this.
Let's now go with the word
Axiom: generally known as the starting point of reasoning or statements that are hold to be self-evidently true, but in this context, let's define it as propositions that are deemed to be obviously true by rote fiat.
Then we have the word
Belief: a proposition that is accepted to be true, but can either be true or false,
and the word
Knowledge: a justified true belief.
This definition was first described by Greek philosopher Plato but some analytical philosophers like Edmund Gettier think that this definition is problematic because of what he called as the Gettier Cases (scenarios where a belief is justified and true but not knowledge; a knowledge acquired by accident) (3). But for the sake of discussion, let's use the said definition anyway because it simply means that we cannot claim to know something unless we can show why it is true.
Let's now make a distinction between the words
Certainty: confidence in the truth of a proposition or in other context, it may have something to do with probability.
Absolute: something that is universal or something that binds all people across space and time, including linguistic and cultural barriers.
When it comes to certainty, either you are sure or not sure about something whether it is true or not. It depends on you if you are confident or not about knowing something. Always remember that certain truths are not necessarily the same with absolute truths. Just because you are confident about your belief doesn't mean your belief is universal.
I could go on here and define some more terminologies, but let's stop here for now. So far, these are the definitions that seems to evade contradictions and confusion, but if you want to reject them, that's fine; if you want to refine them with a much better semantics, you're more than welcome to do that. The point of defining these terms is to make a distinction between the absolute state of external reality and our mental capacity to understand that reality. Now as we've observed in the definitions that we made, we draw a line of differentiation between truth and external reality. It is a mistake to define truth as being synonymous with reality. The two are not the same because external reality is about everything beyond our sensory perception while truth is just a label given to a proposition according to an epistemology. Maybe it's fine to equate those two in everyday use, but if we scrutinize it in strict philosophical sense, it just crumbles apart. If truth is simply reality, then truth cannot be known, and that's the problem that we want to solve in the first place. We ideally want to understand objective reality but at the same time, we are fundamentally disconnected to it, but we still want to try anyway, so all we are going to do is to attempt formulating beliefs by assembling them into linguistic propositions, then we define an epistemology that measures the truthiness of these propositions, and label them as true or false.
Concerning about truth assignment functions
Moving along, we now need to define an explicit set of epistemic rules or truth assignment functions, but here's the problem: Anyone is free to define whatever epistemology they want to choose, because there's simply no such thing as an absolute universal epistemology that binds everyone across space and time. The best that we can do is to give you a proposition, apply some algorithm on it, then label it whether it's true or false. We cannot just pop open some can of objective reality and observe which is true, because we cannot do that in any sense. All we can do is to figure out something else that at least approximates this goal. How can you exactly do that? It's entirely up to you. Let's now give an example: I watched the debate between between Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and the famous Young Earth Creationist Ken Ham over the topic of evolution versus biblical creation (Link to the full debate). Bill happens to define his epistemology in accordance with science, reason, logic, and evidence, while Ken's epistemology is defined by the complete literal interpretation of the Bible. I mean, this guy actually said in his blog of Answers in Genesis that:
"By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record."
Even if this sounds stupid, who are we to convince him that he's wrong and we're right? That's his epistemology and it's fine for him. Remember that we cannot access the objective reality to prove who's right and who's wrong, so if he wants to define his truth assignment functions that way, then good for him.
"Hey, that's relativism!" In some sense, yes, but in other ways, it's not. Keep in mind that all that we did is to distinguish reality from our ability to understand it. Sure, there's maybe an absolute objective reality out there, but we just need to acknowledge that we cannot absolutely know it and the epistemic rules that we use for that purpose are not set in stone. If that makes you uncomfortable, then don't worry because there's actually an epistemic system that is objectively better than others, and that even Ken Ham himself cannot refute. Maybe you can believe whatever you want but sooner or later, we need to translate our beliefs into actions and those actions have objective consequences in the real world, and then we need to make decisions under the expectation of desirable outcomes. That epistemic system is known as basic philosophical pragmatism. But for now, let's bear in mind that truth is a label that we determined in accordance to an epistemology.
What do Christian apologists got wrong about defining truth?
Meanwhile, let's now move on to what truth means to other philosophical viewpoints, especially to Christian apologists. If you ever read some other apologetic books out there, it is noticeable that they have this some sort of almost weird fetishism about this whole notion of absolute truth, and there are popular interpretations about it like that absolute truth is just the same as reality or absolute truth is a thing unto itself that exists that was given by the uber-galactic creator of the universe, God, himself. To begin, I'm already saying that these definitions are problematic, but for now, let's accept these without contention. Let's say that for now, we accept the proposition that truth is simply a synonym for reality. If you think about it, asking the question "Does absolute truth exists?" is no different than asking "Is reality real?" or "Does existence exist?" I mean, yes, existence exists because the question literally answers itself and it gets you nowhere. It's nothing but a vapid tautology (a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form; a statement in which the same thing is said twice in different words). Although we've already demonstrated earlier that truth is not the same as reality in philosophical sense, but even if we granted this proposition, the whole discussion about the absolute truth doesn't actually take us anywhere. I'm actually having a hard time believing that this is what philosophers and apologists mean when they talk about the idea of absolute truth, and yet they write entire book chapters justifying a glorified tautology. They equate truth with something that is unreachable by our mental capacity, therefore this is a bad definition.
Let's now consider the idea that truth is literally some kind of an intrinsic metaphysical property of propositions themselves, and we're going to call this as the Platonic Definition of Truth. That is to say, truth is some kind of a literal metaphysical immaterial thing unto itself that literally exists outside of the fabric of space and time and that somehow manifests as an essential property of all propositions. To illustrate the point, consider the Electron Analogy: the electrons of an atom have an intrinsic charge and mass and those are the one of the properties of that particle. In the same sense, propositions have intrinsic truthiness to them, and it's fine and not that actually so terrible because we've already so used to talk about truth in that kind of definition. But the problem comes along the moment you try to apply it in a much deeper philosophical sense. Ask yourself, if truth is a literal thing unto itself that actually exists, then how do you know that it actually exists? What is the objective standard that you used to come with a conclusion that it is true that truth is a thing? Again, we are now going back again to the same problem that we are supposed to be avoiding. Because if truth literally exists metaphysically outside of the fabric of space and time, then you cannot know it objectively and we still need to define an epistemology to measure its truth value. It's just pulling our problem back to the start. Now, let's ignore all of that and still accept that all propositions have inherent objective truth value about them. What if I tell you a proposition like "This sentence is false."? What will happen then? A GODDAMN PARADOX, THAT'S WHAT WILL HAPPEN! This problem is known as the Liar's Paradox and it is one of the reasons for headaches among philosophers for years (4). If you say that the proposition "This sentence is false" is true, then the sentence is false, but the sentence says that it is false, and indeed it is false, so it must be true then. Think about it, if you actually believe that truth is a literal inherent essential property of this sentence, then you have a very big problem here and this proposition must now cause the universe to fall apart because it's an absolute paradox. It's a total contradiction and there's no way for it to be true and false at the same time. Therefore, truth is surely not an inherent objective Platonic essence associated into a proposition.
How about we now remind ourselves that truth is just a label that you slap into a proposition, and see what will happen? Consider this scenario: suppose that I have two boxes that says "true" and "false," then I give you a piece of paper with a proposition. Now I give you a paper with a proposition that says "This sentence is false," then you apply an truth assignment function that all epistemic propositions that are circular, self-referencing, and contradictory are false, and finally, you put that paper on the false box. Voila! You've just solved the Liar's Paradox! I mean, that statement describes nothing, it's incoherent, it's meaningless, so I'm just going to say that it's false. There's nothing contradictory about this process at all, and it fixes so many philosophical headaches. On the other hand, maybe you think that we need a third box for undecidable, or unknown, or incoherent propositions, then you put the piece of paper there, and that's fine too. There's actually a term for that kind of logical system that has three labels (true, false, unknown), and we call that as ternary logic. Now how about I give you another piece of paper that says "Absolute truth exists." You apply a truth assignment function on it, let's say, all contradictory propositions are false. Since truth is determined by epistemologies that are not universal, to say that absolute truth exists is to say that there exists a universal thing that is not universal, and it's a contradiction. Therefore you put it in the false box. It's just a plain and simple algorithmic processing, no tautologies, no contradictions.
Now someone might object that this almost means to permit everyone to believe whatever they want or epistemic relativism, and they would be right on a small extent. But so what? Nothing forces anyone to believe anything, since many people already believe in so many wacky nonsense, and that's just them expressing their right. But remember, whatever beliefs that you are holding, you will inevitably need to act on them accordingly. I need to decide and to have choices under the expectations of desirable consequences, and so do you and everybody else. Therefore the objective arbiter of our beliefs is whether or not the outcomes of your actions in accordance to those beliefs are desirable or expected.
Absolute truth absolutely does not exists
So the next time someone, especially an apologist, ask you if "absolute truth exists," the obvious answer is NO! And then they might reply by using the Roadrunner Tactic, asking you if it's "absolutely true that absolute truth does not exist," as if that's a gotcha question. It's an equivocation fallacy (using a word with two different meanings in an argument to make it ambiguous and misleading), because it's one thing to be "absolutely certain" or to be confident on the truthiness of a proposition according to an epistemology, and it's entirely another thing for those propositions to be universal, binding all people across space and time, including cultural and linguistic barriers. External reality may certainly be an absolute universal thing that exists out there, but what's not absolute in that sense is our perfect capability of knowing it. We can do our very best to describe and understand reality but the perfect, absolute certainty of knowing it is simply unachievable, because that is just the nature of our limited subjective internal reality. Swallow this bitter pill and just get over with our lives. Aside from that, truth is not the same as reality, in a philosophical sense; it's not a literal metaphysical immaterial thing that exists outside of the fabric of space and time; and it's not a Platonic essential property of ideas and propositions themselves. It's merely a label that we assign to propositions according to a given well-specified rules, and that's it. It maybe sounds so rigid or technical, but if we want to be philosophically precise in our words, then this is a more workable and functional definition to use. Therefore the whole idea of absolute truth is already a philosophical dead-end, because at best, it's just a meaningless tautology, and at worst, it's internally incoherent. There will be no epistemology that universally binds everyone to consistently put a label in a proposition as "true." So say it with me kids: ABSOLUTE TRUTH ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT EXISTS!
"If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it." - Albert Camus (The Fall)
For continuation, go to the blog The Wonders of Pragmatic Empirical Rationalism
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Date Published: June 26, 2020
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