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.