Tag Archives: Faith

What to Do if Absolute Truth Doesn’t Exist?

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As I’ve written about many times on this blog, we cannot step outside of our own perspective to look at “the naked world as it really is”. That is, we are fundamentally subjective in any judgments we make, moral other otherwise. We simply have no possibility for holding on to anything “absolute” in the world, in which absolute should be interpreted as “something” the existence of which cannot be doubted, is unalterable or permanent. And although we can agree upon something being a “permanent” fact – and thereby making it a permanent fact, if we keep on holding on to it for long enough – a fact remains a subjective construct, having no absolute connection, or at least not one detectable by us, with the world outside of us (given that such a world would exist). While this might sound radical, it might be true from a philosophical point of view – or at least: from my philosophical point of view.

From a scientific point of view, the notion of “absolute” truth can be discarded in an other way: by saying that there can merely be evidence for or against the existence of a phenomenon – but no definite (read: absolute) conclusions. And it is therefore – one could say – that we cannot claim to be certain regarding the (absolute) truth of any of our scientific theories.

Philosophy, however, can go one step further by claiming that the notion of “truth” is in itself no empirical issue at all. Because, one could say, empirical data are about the outside world and the phenomena this world imprints upon the subject, while having no clue whether the connection between this world and the subject is absolutely (read: 100%) as we believe it to be. We assume it is, we assume there to be such a connection, but we don’t know. And we’ll likely never know. That’s a fundamental consequence of being human.

Does this imply that we cannot know anything for certain about the world around us? Does this mean that solipsism (the philosophical position that the only claims we can be sure about are claims about our minds and what exists in it) is the only “truly true” position? Yes, maybe it does. But it’s important to see the difference between the notion of certainty and the notion of truth. While certainty refers to us having a “certain” degree of faith in having an accurate set of beliefs about the world around us, truth – as being the “absolute” value striven for in all of our knowledge – implies 100% certainty regarding the accuracy of our beliefs/claims. And while the former can be reasonably applied to the external world – and our claims about it – the latter should be reserved only for those claims we cannot deny without stumbling into philosophical paradoxes. And although it might be counter-intuitive to deny the existence of the outside world, it isn’t impossible. On the other hand, as Descartes showed, denying the existence of the mind is much harder – even impossible.

I shortly touched upon the notion of “certainty” as representing the degree of certainty in the accuracy of a claim (60%, 45%, etc.). But, given that we’ve seen that there is no “absolute” link (at least no one we can be sure of) between the external world and our inner world (mind, gut feelings etc.), how then can we come to judge the certainty of a claim. How’s that possible if certainty is interpreted as being the degree of belief in the truth of a claim? We don’t know the (absolute) truth of a claim, so how can we come to certainty regarding the truth of our claims?

I believe we can only do so by dropping the notion of certainty as something that stands in some sort of relation to the “truth”, as being an absolute entity only attainable through Cartesian Skepticism. When we drop the notion of truth, while engaged in our scientific efforts and daily lives, we can come to a construct of “certainty” that is based upon intersubjectivity, the degree in which claims are accepted by members of society. And intersubjectivity is founded on many subjectivities, which are ultimately founded on – if not the external world – intuitions about the way the world works. And it is in these intuitions that we find the “absolute truths” that we believe we come closer to by means of science. When a new scientific theory is accepted that changes the way we think about the world around us, it’s not because the new theory corresponds better to reality – the world outside of us, the world which “true colors” never shine through – but because the new theory corresponds better to our intuition. And since all human beings share the same sense of “primal” intuition (evolutionary developed or otherwise), we can come to intersubjectively “certain” (read: useful, “natural”) beliefs.

But what do you think?

The Recurrence of Difficult Decisions

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Most of the people that are in their early twenties – and that I know of – seem to have no clue about what to do with their lives. And I am not talking about the “I don’t know what kind of shirt to wear” kind of don’t having a clue. No, I am talking about a fundamental – almost existential – sense of doubt. A sense of doubt that – at times – seems to come awfully close to a desperate confession of the inherent meaninglessness of life; a confession of the lack an innate purpose in life. But why is that so? And could there be something wrong with this view?

We all know that feeling of “standing on a crossroads in life”. In some sense you could say that every new situation we’re faced with in life is such a crossroads. Shall I go to the grocery store, or not? Shall I sleep a little longer, or not? Shall I go left, or shall I go right? These are choices we’ve got to make on a daily basis. And having to make choices is an inescapable part of life. It’s just as true as that other truism of life: the fact that we are all going to die. But why then are “the students” so hesitant in cutting the cord and making a choice? Well, frankly, “we” believe that – compared to all the decisions we’ve made before – this time a truly big decision has to be made that is truly going to influence our lives for now and forever.

Some decisions are likely to have a bigger impact upon your life than others. Deciding who to marry is likely to influence the course of your life more than the decision to buy that cheap peanut-butter in the grocery store. And it is this realization of “influencing the course of our lives” that seems to paralyze many of us in the student community, and leave us with a sense of despair. And that’s understandable, right? There’s reason to be afraid. Choosing – for example – what to specialize in within your field of study is, from all the decisions you have made up to that point in your life, likely to have the biggest impact upon the type of job you’ll get, and therefore upon the way you’ll spend a big time of – the remainder of – your life (both financially and time-wise).

But, when you dig a little deeper into the caverns of your mind, and really start to question the nature of life, aren’t you then forced to jump to the conclusion that there is always that next big thing to worry about? That there will always be that next issue you need to get out of your system before you can “finally” move on with your life? But, and here’s the catch, what if that is life? What if life is nothing more than a string of decisions? Then we are about to live a rather anxious live, aren’t we? If we are constantly being worried about the choices we have made, and those we are about to make, we’ll pretty much have no time to do anything else at all. We would have to quit our jobs, and feel down all day. And that isn’t a very compelling foresight, is it? So maybe we (the students) just have to stop being such pussies. Maybe we just have to accept that we cannot predict the future, and that we have nothing to guide us in our life journeys besides our very own compass: faith or intuition or how you call it. Because having faith is the only manner by which we can prevent the train of decisions from killing us, and thereby enable us to “finally” go on with the rest of our lives.

But what do you think?

Does The Truth Exist?

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What is it that we humans beings truly know? About what are we absolutely certain? And will it ever be possible to know everything? And, if so, how could we know that have come to know everything? These are fascinating but difficult questions and trying to answer them all at once is very likely to lead to little result and a firm headache. Therefore we will just pick one of them, and that is: does the truth exist?

We always see the world through our own eyes. Even when we are trying – like I am doing right now – to develop a meta-perspective upon how we as a species should think about ourselves, we will never be able to become fully detached from our own inherently limited points of view within which all of our beliefs reside. And it is because of this inability of ours to transcend ourselves that coming to know how things “truly” are seems to be an impossible task. That is: impossible for us human beings. If we would be Gods, it might have been a different story.

But what now? What if we cannot ever touch upon “the truth as it truly is”? Well, we could of course fall back upon Cartesian skepticism with its beautiful credo of: “I can doubt everything but the fact that it is me who is doubting.” It is in this one little sentence that Descartes describes what it to be human. It is also in this one little sentence that Descartes has lain down the fundamentals of what might be the single most admirable human trait: the trait of humbleness. A trait that is rooted in our fundamental and inescapable ignorance. A trait that fosters respect for each other’s (different) ideas about the way the world works. We are all the same in our ignorance; so don’t take your own ideas too seriously. But given that there is nothing we cannot doubt – expect the fact that it is us who are doubting – what are the implications of this observation with regard to our quest for the “truth”?

Let’s see. The human quest for knowledge – or the “truth” – is the most praiseworthy and impossible journey we have ever embarked on. But even though the residence of “truth” might be impossible to find, we still have no reason to stop our efforts for obtaining this holy grail of knowledge. I even dare to say that it is a great good that we simple human beings will never come to touch upon “the truth as it really is”. Since, it is for as long as there is no single “truth” pressing down upon our human souls that we will be able to create our own truths. But that seems kind of vague, right? What does it mean to “create our own truths”? And isn’t that idea contradictory to the core meaning of the notion of “truth”?

It seems fair to assume that each and every person on this planet of ours has got a certain set of beliefs about the way the world works and the way the world should work. And although none of us will ever come to know whether our beliefs are true in the absolute sense of the word, we still consider ourselves to have reasons for believing our beliefs to be true. And it is just because of these reasons that we consider our beliefs to be true. The reasons act as the foundation on top of which our beliefs hold true. And it is throughout the course of our lives that you and I are likely to have developed different sets of beliefs about the world we are living in. You might believe that people are essentially good, while I might believe that they are essentially bad. In other words: both of us have – throughout our lives – developed a grounding consisting of reasons because of which we have come to believe what we consider to be true. This explains why someone always has to come up with “reasons” in order to convince another person of the truthfulness of ideas. Since it is only because of these reasons that beliefs come to be true. Without these reasons the other person would literally have no reason to believe your idea to be true.

This observation shows that “truthfulness” is a dynamic property. One year you might consider a certain idea to be true, while the following year you might consider this same idea to be false (think about you believing in Santa Claus while you were a kid). That is to say that, by experiencing changes in your reasons for believing something, you simply cannot help but changing your ideas as well.

Therefore the relevant question becomes: how do we come to believe what we believe? I personally think that there is a huge amount of arbitrariness playing a role in this. I mean: we haven’t decided to be born in the country in which we actually have been born, did we? But – assuming that you live in the Western World – how do you think that your view on the world would have been if you would have been born in – let’s say – Africa? How would your view on the world have been if you would not have been educated in the manner that you are? How would your view on the world have been if you as a child had to work 80 hours per week in order for your family to be able to survive?

I want to ask you the following question, and it is a very important one: given that you would indeed have been born in Africa and given that you would have developed a set of beliefs that is different from the one you are having today, would this make the beliefs you would have had if you would have been born in Africa any less true than the ones you are having today? I do not think so. And that is where the arbitrariness of our notions of the “truth” comes in.

What I have tried to show in this article is that our beliefs are not true simply because we believe them to be true. It would indeed have been very satisfying to know that our beliefs about the the way the world works are the ones that are true and that the beliefs of others are just plain nonsense. But the truth of the matter is that in the end, everything comes down to faith. Whether it is – as can be read in a latter article of mine – within the realm of science or religion, it does not matter. The last step – the step of faith – always has to be taken by yourself, and it is that step that makes your beliefs come to be true.

Don’t you believe this is fascinating? The idea that everything – all the things we consider to be true and all the things that we consider to be false – is just a matter of believing? And that this is all we will ever know? I most certainly do. Believe me.

The Leap of Faith: The Creative Element of Science

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Scientific realists are known to have a positive epistemic attitude towards the content of our best scientific theories and models. The exact interpretation of this philosophical tenet can, however, differ dramatically between each of its proponents. Some of them base their idea of the truthfulness of scientific realism upon the seeming success of the reference of its theoretical terms to the things in the world. Others refer to the scientific method of inquiry as making science an adequate system for capturing reality. Here, I’ll interpret scientific realism not so much in terms of the truthfulness of its terms or a method of inquiry, but in terms of the faith one puts in the ontology of scientific theories. …Or, as the objective interpretation of scientific realism goes, in scientific theories as giving an adequate representation of a mind-independent world. However, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with this representation of a “mind-independent” world? To see this, we first of all have to understand what science and its purpose within our society is.

Science is involved in the production of knowledge. It does this by gathering large lumps of data and extracting what are the seemingly underlying structures responsible for the phenomena being detected. Usually, on an “objective” interpretation of science, we think of science discovering the way the world works. Science is involved in writing down whatever kinds of regularities are being detected in the world. However, is this truly the manner in which knowledge is being created?

I believe that one crucial element is being left out of this picture, and it is this element that is responsible for the progression and the advancement in science as we experience it on a daily basis, and the seemingly never-ending accumulation of facts in which it results. I am talking, of course, about the element of inference. The notion of inference has been well discussed by philosophers ever since Hume pointed out the incomprehensible problems associated with it. However, apart from Hume’s ideas about the indeterminacy of scientific theories and the problems it causes, in what way does the inferential relationship – which is present in every logical system consisting of premises and conclusions – manifest itself in the daily life of a scientist? And what is its role with regard to the production of facts?

Let’s take a look at an example. Imagine a scientist who has made the following observation: (A) human skin gets agitated when it gets in touch with a deadly nightshade (which – apparently – is a type of plant). Furthermore, the scientist believes to know that (B) a poisonous plant makes one’s skin agitated. Therefore – and let’s assume that this was unknown up till that point in time – the scientist claims that (C) deadly nightshade must be poisonous. Or, to put it more formally, (A^B) –> C. Given that the scientist has enough data to back up this claim, he or she has just created what we consider to be a fact.

But what would have happened if the scientist would have went home after making the observation responsible for premise A? Then no fact, and thus no new knowledge, would have been produced. That is, the scientist would have remained stuck at the level of observation, a level that can be reached by each and every one of us and therefore would not create any scientific value, a.k.a. knowledge. It is only because of the scientist being a person who has studied botany for years, who has confidence in his or her own capabilities and who has a basic sense of logic, that the step from mere observation to fact can be made. And it is by making this step, the step represented by the “–>” symbol in the logical formulation, that the scientist adds value to the “knowledge-producing factory” called science.

Two noteworthy implications follow from this observation. The first is that facts about the world around us are, whether we like it or not, constructed on a very fundamental level. There is always a human being needed in order to take the last step and create the knowledge: to take the observation and the knowledge at hand, and make an inference leading to the creation of new facts. And it is because of this inference, which is an activity that has to be performed by us human beings with our minds and our souls, that objectivism, with its proclaimed access to mind-independent knowledge, is untenable.

But watch it: It is explicitly not being said that the observed regularities in the world did not occur before the scientist came along and used the data about these regularities in producing our so-called facts. No claims are being made about any causal relationship between the domain of knowing (epistemology) and the domain of beings (ontology). What is being said is that what happens within the domain of beings is completely irrelevant to us human beings, since we will never be able to access the domain of beings – from a mind-independent point of view – in order to know what would be happening there. All that we know is that, after the scientist has finished its research, the fact is there.

A second implication of this plea for constructivism is that, on the most fundamental level, science does not seem to differ from religion – or from any other system of beliefs for that matter – in any fundamental manner. Both of these domains are dominated by people who believe in the truths of the ideas brought forth within these domains. None of the ideas produced within these domains will be true – at least not in a sense of being true independently on the human mind – unless they are believed to be true. And it is this believing that is an inherently human, and thus mind-dependent, ability which provides us access to the only realm of truth we will ever know: the realm of beliefs.

So the question is: is knowledge being constructed by scientists as an outcome of a fact-seeking process? Or are facts existing somewhere out there in the world, true whether they are discovered or not? And, if so, true in what sense?

Note: an adaptation of this article has been published at www.partiallyexaminedlife.com.