Absolute Truth

Does it exist?

Yes.

If there's anything we can say with an extremely high degree of confidence, it's this.  Per my original definition of truth, what we're saying is "there is absolutely an actual state of affairs."

Note what I'm not saying at this point.  I'm not making any claims about God or morality or religion, or anything of the sort.  I'm simply saying there is a state of affairs, and it applies to everyone, everywhere.

This might be easier to understand in the context of some more specific issues.

Take one I already mentioned--God.  He either exists or he doesn't.  To say he exists for some people but not others, or under some conditions but not others, doesn't make sense.  There are only two discrete answers.  He either is or isn't.  We may have different opinions on what the correct answer is to this question, and we may have differing levels of confidence about what we think, but I don't think anyone would argue that there is a definite answer to this question.  To say otherwise is to defy all conventions of human logic and reason.

Let's dissect further.

Analyze the claim this post is making: "There is absolute truth."  Now consider the opposite: "There is no absolute truth."

There is no absolute truth.  Really?  Is that absolutely true?  Think about it and you'll realize that statement in and of itself is an absolute truth claim.  The statement is self-defeating--in other words, the claim and its premise(s) are in contradiction.  It's like someone telling you "the word 'the' does not exist".  You'd quickly respond with, "What are you talking about?  You just used the word in attempting to say it didn't exist."

To say "there are no absolutes" is similarly self-defeating.

If you want to make a similar claim that would not be self-defeating, you could say: "The only absolute truth is this--there are no other absolute truths."  Fair enough.  That could be the case, but my original claim stands unscathed! (Plus, as we'll examine later, no one actually lives their lives in such a pervasive denial of absolutes...to do so would be hopelessly meaningless)

Can we know absolute truth?

No.  Not absolutely, anyway.

I think this is where people get confused.  With the advent of postmodernism we hear a lot of claims today like "there are no absolutes" or "true for you but not for me".  As we established above, these types of statements are complete nonsense and illogical.  I think the leg they stand on, though, is that although there must be truth and it must be absolute, we simply can't know it absolutely for sure.

Why not?  Because we are finite beings with a finite capacity for thought and observation.  For things external to ourselves, we base our conclusions on limited experience and a limited number of observations.  Over a lifetime we develop knowledge of the patterns by which the world works, and we deduce certain outcomes based on that.  Consider the following questions:

Was George Washington the first president of the United States?
Does the earth orbit the sun?
Will there still be humans living on Earth in a year?

No doubt you were able to answer all of these questions quickly and decisively.  And, unless you think quite differently from me, you probably answered "yes" to all of them.

Yes, George Washington was the first president of the US.  This is attested to by every credible historian and historical text, as well as documents dating back to that time period.  Yes, the earth orbits the sun.  We all studied the laws of Newton and Kepler which show why this must be so, and no scientist has questioned this since the laws became widely understood.  Yes, there will still be humans living on Earth in a year. We've been around a long time and endured a lot of hardships, and there are seven billion of us now. I am hard-pressed to think of a force that could wipe every single one out that quickly.

If you are willing to play skeptic with me for a moment, though, I think you'll see that we base such obvious conclusions on probabilities and not absolute knowledge.  In reality, we don't absolutely know the answers to any of these.

What if a massive ploy by revisionist historians created the persona of George Washington to give us a hero and sense of national pride while hiding a dark secret regarding our nation's founding?  What if aliens abducted the man who was once known as George Washington and took his place to lead our country?

What if as-of-yet undiscovered scientific laws establish that the sun really does orbit the earth?  After all, for thousands of years people thought the sun orbited the earth.  All the evidence they had at the time seemed to point to that fact, until science made advances.  How do we know science won't "advance" again and challenge our long-held preconceptions?

What if a new viral strain or infectious bacteria causes a catastrophic pandemic?  What if a killer asteroid is lurking out in the darkness of space, on a collision course with Earth?  What if the zombie apocalypse is imminent and we are all on the verge of being added to the ranks of the undead?

Ok, so all of these objections are unlikely--some are downright ludicrous--but to one degree or another they are all possible.  Does that change my original answers to the questions?  Not at all!  I know with a high degree of certainty that all three questions can be answered in the affirmative, and I'm not going to spend my life so skeptical that I can't take highly probable assumptions at face value.

I should also clarify at this point that each of the three example questions has an absolute answer (Yes or No), it's only that we don't know what the answer is with absolute certainty.  A relativist answer to whether George Washington was the first US president would be "he was for you, but Thomas Jefferson was the first for me".  To which you respond, "What?!?!  He either was for everyone, or he was for no one!  Your answer doesn't even make sense!"

Conclusion

We've argued from logic that absolute truth must exist.  However, we don't know anything of the nature of this truth.

We've also discovered that absolute truth cannot be known absolutely (perhaps the source of confusion for relativists) but can at best be known with a high degree of probability.  This is true of most questions in life, but eventually we take many things with good evidence at face value, because as finite beings we don't have the time or energy to exhaust all of the evidence.

Can You Handle the Truth?

Jack Nicholson apparently doesn't think so!

Remember that scene from "A Few Good Men"?  Tom Cruise plays the young lawyer investigating the murder of a US serviceman in Guantanamo Bay, and Jack Nicholoson plays the base commander, a colonel.

Nicholson is put on the stand as a witness and Cruise begins to question him rather pointedly, implying Nicholson might have been complicit in the events leading to the serviceman's death.  Nicholson clearly becomes agitated and the exchange goes as follows:

Nicholson: You want answers?
Cruise: I feel I'm entitled to.
Nicholson: You want answers?
Cruise: I want the truth!
Nicholson: You can't handle the truth!

As it turns out, Nicholson was involved in the death of the serviceman.  He furiously defends his actions even while being arrested for his confession on the witness stand.

I think this exchange bears special significance for our journey.  What do you think Nicholson meant when he said "you can't handle the truth"?  Have you ever stopped to think about it?  I think, in essence, what he was saying is "The truth is not what you would expect.  It's something you wouldn't understand and if I tried to explain it to you, you would reject it or misinterpret it.  Your preconceived notions of the way the world works would give you such a bias that you wouldn't be able to see my point of view."

If you're familiar with the remainder of Nicholson's confession and how he justifies himself, I think this explanation makes sense.

So what about you?  Can you handle the truth?  What if it's not what you would expect?  Are you approaching the question with such a bias that you're not even willing to consider opposing viewpoints?  Do you take for granted that what you've always been told is true, for no other reason than that's what you've always been told?  Have you personally investigated the evidence for your own worldview and that of others, to be sure you're actually on the right track?

I must admit this was a stumbling block for me in my own personal journey.  My biggest fear was that I was biased and taking for granted what I had always been told.  I know there are literally BILLIONS of other people out there who have a different worldview than mine.  Are they all simply taking for granted what they've always been told or do they have good reasons for what they believe?  The evidence seemed to be pointing me full circle to what I had always been told since a child, but I was worried my own bias was tainting the evidence so much that I wasn't being objective.

This is an important point.  I've heard it said many ways but I'll word it like this: "the mind will find the evidence that the heart wants to follow."  If you approach a search like this with too much subjectivity, you're going to find exactly what you want to find.  If you're only reading the arguments made by others who share your worldview, you aren't getting the full story.  You need to consider the best case that each worldview has to offer, then, examining the totality of the evidence, select the one that offers the most consistency and coherence.

Or I suppose you could reject everything that evidence and reason are pointing to, and believe what you want anyway.  You have the freedom to do so.

Now is the time to leave ego and bias at the door.  If you're not willing to do that, you might as well not read any further because you've already made up your mind. 

Can you handle the truth?