Re: Alliance for Science

At 07:49 PM 3/11/2006, Pim van Meurs wrote:

>.. When I state that there is no such thing as
>absolute truth, I mean that even if it were to
>exist, we would never be able to know that it did.

@ Are you sure? Is that an absolute truth? LOL

There is No Truth?

I recently was asked a question that I get asked
a lot. It's a common challenge Christians face on
the campus. It was offered as I spoke in the
lecture hall at Oregon Institute of Technology in
Klamath Falls, Oregon, to a Christian group who had rented the facility.

As I flew back this morning I reflected on the
question. I started jotting some notes down, and
it was interesting the way it all fell together.
The question was this: How do you deal with
somebody who says there is no truth?

Now this is very popular claim on campus because
of deconstructionism and postmodernism--the
radical skepticism that's sweeping the academy.
It's the idea that you can't know anything for
sure. Nothing is set in concrete. Everything is
influenced by our culture, our upbringing and our
presuppositions, so it's impossible to get at any objective truth.

I flatly reject this notion that there is no
truth or, if there is, it is unknowable. I think
there are a number of things we can know for sure
simply because the opposite is not possible. If
we can even utter the sentence, "There is no
truth"--and, of course, we must at least utter
the sentence to make the claim--then a number of
things must be objectively true of necessity.

First of all, if someone holds that there is no
truth, then there's at least one thing that's
true: the statement they just uttered that there is no truth.

It's one of those awkward situations for a person
making a claim, because there's no way their
claim can be true. If it's false, it's false (of
course), but if it's true, it's still false. If
it's true that there is no truth, then it's also
false, because the statement itself identifies a truth.

This is called a self-refuting statement. It's as
if I said, "I can't speak a word of English," and
said it in English, that would be self-refuting
of course. The claim "There is no truth" is one
of those kinds of statements. Even to utter the
statement itself is a statement of truth, and so
the statement "There is no truth" can't stand. It
defeats itself. It commits suicide. So it's true
that the statement, "There is no truth" is false.
That's one thing that's true. But there's more.

In order to state the phrase "There is no truth,"
an individual must exist to make the statement
and to ponder whether there are truths or not.

Remember Descartes, sitting in his oven back in
the 17th century? He said, "I can doubt
everything except for one thing. I can't doubt
that I am doubting." From this reflection came
his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."

I must exist if I'm pondering my existence,
Descartes concluded. Someone who states that
there is no truth must exist to make the
statement, and so it's true that at least one
individual, the one uttering the statement, must
exist. So now we have at least two things that are true. But there's more.

Time must also exist.

In order to express the sequence of words "There
is no truth"--or even have such thoughts in one's
mind--the word "is" must come after the word
"there," and the word "no" after both of them,
and one thing can only follow another in temporal
sequence if time exists--present, past and
future. So time must exist as an objectively true
thing, because this statement was uttered with words in temporal sequence.

The statement itself is a proposition, so
propositions must exist. That's a truth.

The phrase also contains tokens, words that token
the ideas (types) behind them. It's true that tokens and types must exist.

The concept of negation expressed in the word "no," must exist as an idea.

There has to be the concept of unity (the idea
that the four words work together in a sentence).

There must be plurality (the multiple words each distinct from one another).

Individuality must exist to differentiate one
word from another, separating the units.

The law of non-contradiction must exist and be
true. If the statement "There is no truth is
true," then its opposite must be false, i.e., if
there is no truth, then it is not the case that there is truth.

That statement is also distinguished from all of
its contradictions, so the law of identity--that
a thing is identical to itself--must be true. A
thing is itself and not something else.

There's at least one sentence that exists,
because the person just uttered it. That must be true.

There are English words, and grammatical
relationships between the words­subject and predicate. That must be true.

The numbers one through four must exist because
there are four different words.

Addition must be true, because you add those units up and get the number four.

The alphabet exists.

Parts of speech, like nouns and verbs, exist as truths.

Do you see the point? In order to even utter the
statement, "There is no truth," there must be at
least 17 things true. They must, in fact, be
necessarily true, given the statement itself.
When I say necessarily true, I mean there's no
way they can be false, given the statement "There
is no truth" uttered in English. If there is such
a statement uttered in English, then all these
other things must be true. It's impossible for them not to be true.

That's why radical skepticism like this is not
justified. As one thinker put it--Dallas Willard,
a Christian philosopher at USC--if we want to be
intellectually honest skeptics, we must be as
skeptical about our skepticism as we are about
our knowledge. We should take the burden of proof
to defend our skepticism instead of simply
asserting our skepticism. Anyone can assert
disbelief. Whether they can make sense out of it is a different thing.

Just uttering the statement, "There is no truth,"
in itself establishes the truth of many different
things. And if we can establish their truth just
by uttering such a statement, then it seems to me
there are a whole lot of other things we can
determine to be true as well, and can be just as certain about.

Therefore, radical skepticism is unjustified. The
statement "There is no truth" is false. ~ Greg Koukl

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?t=8165
Received on Sat Mar 11 21:32:30 2006