Relativism – Maverick Philosopher

Assuming that God exists, could the atheist’s denial of God be reasonable?

I say Yes to the title question; Greg Bahnsen, glossing Cornelius Van Til, says No.

Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is 'reasonable' to believe in him. (Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, p. 124, fn. 108, emphasis added.)

This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there in no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both 'logical' and 'probabilistic' arguments. So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists? Bahnsen's claim makes no sense. It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.

Bahnsen is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative. This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists. Let me explain.

I do not need to spend many words on the absoluteness of truth. I've made the case numerous times. Here for example. In any case, whatever presuppositionalists such as Bahnsen think of the details of my arguments, they will agree with my conclusion that truth is absolute. So that is no bone of contention between us.

Reasonableness or rational acceptability is something else again. It is not absolute but can vary from person to person, generation to generation, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, and in other ways. Let's quickly run through a few familiar examples.

1) Falling bodies. It 'stands to reason' that the heavier an object the faster it falls if dropped from a height. It's 'logical' using this word the way many ordinary folk often do. Wasn't Aristotle, who maintained as much in his Physics, a reasonable man? But we now know that the rate of free fall (in a vacuum) is the same in a given gravitational field regardless of the weight of the object in that field. So what was reasonable to Aristotle and his entire epoch was not reasonable to Galileo and later epochs. Rational acceptability is relative.

2) For the ancients, water was an element. For John Dalton (English chemist, early 19th cent.) it was a compound, HO. For us it is H₂O. Has water changed over the centuries? No. Truth is non-relative. What it is reasonable to believe has changed. Rational acceptability is relative.

3) Additivity of velocities. It 'stands to reason' that if I am on a train moving in a straight line with velocity v₁ and I throw a ball in the direction of the train's travel with velocity v₂, then the velocity of the ball will be v₁ + v₂. It also 'stands to reason' that this holds across the board no matter the speed of the objects in question. But this belief, although reasonable pre-Einstein, is not reasonable post-Einstein. Once again we see that rational acceptability is relative.

4) Sets and their members. Suppose S is a set and T is one of S's proper subsets. Then every member of T is a member of S, but not every member of S is a member of T. Now suppose someone comes along and asserts that there are sets such that one is a proper subset of another and yet both have the same number of members. Many if not most people would find this assertion a highly unreasonable thing to say. They might exclaim that it makes no bloody sense at all. And yet those of us who have read Georg Cantor find it reasonable to maintain. If N is the set of natural numbers, and E is the set of even numbers, and O is the set of odd numbers, then E and O are disjoint (have no members in common), and yet each is a proper subset of N which the same cardinality (number of members) as N.

5) When I was a very young boy I thought that, since I am right-handed, my right hand and arm had to be weaker than my left hand and arm because I use my right hand and arm more. Was that reasonable for me to believe way back then? Yes! I had a reason to hold the empirically false belief. Of course, my little-boy reasoning was based on a false analogy. If you flex a piece of metal back and forth you weaken it. If you a flex a muscle back and forth you strengthen it. Use it and use it up? No, use it or lose it!

Examples are easily multiplied beyond all necessity. The point, I trust, is clear: while truth is absolute, rational acceptability is relative. What is true may or may not be reasonable, and what is reasonable may or not be true.

What Bahnsen and the boys appear to be assuming is that both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute. Well they are — but only for God, only from God's point of view. God is the IRS, the ideally rational subject. He knows every truth and he knows every truth without possibility of mistake. So for God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true. But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a 'presupper' does.

But of course neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do. But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?

Wokery and the Double Denial

Substack latest.

It is not unreasonable to maintain that there is no God and that nature alone exists. But suppose you take it a step further and deny nature as well. Then you are in the precincts of 'woke' lunacy. Call it the Double Denial. On the Double Denial, everything is a social construct, including the social constructors. Could they too be social constructs? How?

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

Substack latest.

Tulsi Gabbard Defends Objective Truth . . .

. . . at a rally to end child mutilation. Gabbard's three-minute address begins at 19:30 and runs until 22:42. "Without recognition that there is such a thing as truth, there are no boundaries in our society, which why we are where we are."

That something so obvious needs to be stated explicitly shows how far we have fallen. But precisely because we have fallen so far, Tulsi Gabbard is to be applauded for having courageously stated it. That it should take courage to state something so obvious is yet another index of our social decline.

And now, if you can spare ten minutes, listen to Chloe Cole's story at 47:15-57:50.

True For and True

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, ‘true for X’ are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: ‘true for me,’ ‘true for you,’ ‘true for Jews,’ ‘true for Arabs,’ ‘true for the proletariat,’ ‘true for the bourgeoisie,’ ‘true for our historical epoch,’ and the like. Such semantic prophylaxis would disallow such sentences as ‘That may be true for you but it is not true for me.’

The trouble with expressions like these is that they blur the distinction between truth and belief. To say that a proposition p is true for S is just to say that S believes or accepts or affirms that p. This is because one cannot believe a proposition without believing it to be true. Of course, S’s believing that p, and thus S’s believing that p is true, does not entail that p is true. This is obvious if anything is. There are true beliefs and false beliefs, and a person’s holding a belief does not make it true. If you want to say that S believes that p, then say that. But don’t say that p is true for S unless you want to give aid and comfort to alethic relativism, the false and pernicious doctrine that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative. 'Woke' folk love such obfuscatory expressions, but you don't want to give aid and comfort to them, do you?

A belief is always someone’s belief. This relativity of beliefs to believers explains why one person’s believing that p and another person’s believing that ~p is unproblematic. But truth is non-relative, or absolute. This is why it cannot be the case that both p and ~p. If you have truth, you have something absolute. There is no such thing as relative truth. Relative truth is not truth any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck or artificial leather is leather or faux marble is marble. In the expression, ‘relative truth,’ ‘relative’ functions as an alienans (as opposed to a specifying) adjective: it alienates or shifts the sense of ‘truth.’ Just as it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of leather, real and artificial, it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of truth, relative and absolute. Suppose someone sets out to list the kinds of leather. “Well, you got your horse leather, cow leather, alligator leather, artificial leather, real leather, artificially real leather, naugahyde, Barcalounger covering . . . .” One can see what is wrong with this.

The word ‘absolute’ scares some people. But the only reason I use it is to undo the semantic mischief caused by ‘relative truth’ and ‘true for X.’ In a logically perfect world, it would suffice to say ‘true’ or ‘leather.’ There would be no need to say ‘absolutely true’ or ‘real leather’ – “This here jacket a mahn is REAL leather, boy . . . .” If ‘relative’ and ‘artificial’ are (in the above examples) alienating adjectives, then ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ could be called de-alienating: they restore their rightful senses to words that semantic bandits divested them of.

One reason ‘absolute’ scares people is that it suggests dogmatism and infallibilism. Thus if I say that truth is absolute, some people think I am saying that the propositions I affirm as true I affirm as unquestionably or undeniably true. But that’s to confuse an ontological statement about the nature of truth with an epistemological statement about the way in which I accept the propositions I accept. It is consistent to maintain that truth is absolute while being a fallibilist, where a fallibilist holds that either no proposition held to be true, or no member of some restricted class of propositions held to be true, is known with certainty.

In sum, my point is that ‘true for X’ should be avoided since it gives aid and comfort to the illusion that truth is relative. But why exactly is that an illusion? I’ll leave that question for a separate post.

Student Relativism

From my first weblog, dated 28 September 2004:

Student relativism is not so much a philosophical theory as a form of psychic insulation. An outgrowth of adolescent rebelliousness, it says: "You can't teach me anything because truth is relative; we all have our own truths."

Not being a philosophical theory, Student Relativism cannot be refuted in the usual ways. It is a pathology that must be outgrown. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which adolescence in many extends into the twenties, thirties, and beyond. Some remain life-long adolescents in their mentality. Many if not most of these characters are found on the Left.

A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One’s Values on Others

Here, at MavPhil Strictly Philosophical

Narratives and the Left

Leftists love narratives because a narrative needn't be true to be a narrative. Their assessment criteria are identity-tribal rather than logical. A good narrative is a coherent story that enhances the tribe's power. Whether true or false is not to the point, the point being power. Truth is not a leftist value. It is not a norm that constrains their speaking and thinking. That is not to say that leftists don't sometimes speak the truth; they do when it serves their purposes. They don't when it doesn't. Truth for a leftist has a merely instrumental value, not an absolute value.

Some have the chutzpah to deny that there is truth, which is different from admitting that there is and denying its value. There is no truth, they hold, only power. If you ask them whether it is true that there is no truth, only power, they dismiss the very question with a power move. They either have no intellectual conscience or they suppress it. They enforce the power-is-all doctrine which is not admitted to be a doctrine. A doctrine is a teaching, and a teaching can be true or false; but then a transcendental norm comes back in, the norm of truth. So the 'consistent' leftist cannot allow himself to think; he must power his way through.

Denying truth and its value, they deny logical consistency and its value. For consistency is defined in terms of truth. Propositions are collectively logically consistent just in case they can all be true. So you can't get through to a leftist who maintains both that there is no truth, only power, but then complains that racist whites dominate blacks. There is no objecting to that if the world at bottom is just power centers battling it out. There can't be anything wrong with whites dominating blacks if all is power in the end. If all is power, and I have the power to enslave you, and the power to ward of any unpleasant (to me) consequences of my enslaving you, then why shouldn't I? If all is power, then there is nothing beyond power to which appeal can be made. If might makes right, then there is no right. It is inconsistent to hold that all is power and that some of its deployments are evil. If all is power, there is no good and evil. Any attempt to reduce good and evil to power terms results in the elimination of good and evil. But, as I said, you can't reach hard-core leftists because they will just make another power move and dismiss the question of consistency as they dismissed the question of truth.

If there is right irreducible to might, that right is impotent here below if every broker in this broken world is a power broker. Only those spiritually sensitive to right and its claims can guide might in the ways of right, but such sensitive souls do not flourish in this mighty brutal world.

Truth, Fallibilism, Objectivism, and Dogmatism

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason, with the question whether there is truth. Truth is one thing, fallibility another. A fallibilist need not be a truth-denier. One can be both a fallibilist and an upholder of truth. What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some, but not all, classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the existence of truth. If we can be wrong about how Epstein met his end, then we can be right.

I spoke above of truth sans phrase, without qualification. There is no need to speak of objective or of absolute truth since truth by its very nature is objective and absolute. Talk of relative truth is incoherent. Of course, what I accept as true or believe to be true may well be different from what you accept as true or take to be true. But that does not show that truth is relative; it shows that we differ in our beliefs. Suppose you believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child molestation ring out of a Washington, D. C pizza joint. I don't believe that. You accept a proposition that I reject. But the proposition itself — that Hillary ran a molestation ring, etc. — is either true or false independently of anyone's belief state.

So don't confuse being true with being-believed-by-someone-or-other.

But what about an omnisicent being? Doesn't such a being believe all and only true propositions? I should think so if the omniscient being has beliefs and has them in the way we do. But does he believe the truths because they are true, or are they true because he believes them? This is a nice little puzzle reminiscent of Plato's Euthryphro Paradox, to be found in the eponymous dialog. (Indeed it has the same structure as that paradox.) Note that the puzzle cannot get off the ground without the distinction between truth and belief — which is my point, or one of them.

(Like I said, it's all footnotes to Plato, but it's not all from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.)

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word. To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it in particular cases. The upholder of the existence of truth need not be a dogmatist. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the existence of objective truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

One of the Ways Moral Relativism Defeats Itself

Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement quotes an NYT commenter:

One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan….Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

Suppose that good and evil are not absolute but are culturally relative. Why should we recognize this? And why shouldn't we impose our Western values on benighted jihadis?

For the argument in full dress, see A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One's Values on Others.

Scott Adams’ Starting Point

Here:

For new readers of this blog, my starting point is the understanding that human brains did not evolve to show us reality. We aren’t that smart. Instead, our brains create little movies in our heads, and yours can be completely different from mine. We see that situation now. Half the country thinks President Trump is well on his way to becoming a Hitler-like dictator. But many other Americans think Trump is an effective business person with good intentions. They can’t both be right.

"They can't both be right." True, but how could Adams possibly know this if the human brain does not "show us reality"? According to the "little movie" in Adams' head, Trump cannot be both Hitlerian and non-Hitlerian. But there is this other guy, Shmadams, in whose head a "completely different little movie" plays according to which Trump can be both Hitlerian and non-Hitlerian.

So I tax Adams with the following dilemma. If he is justified in his claim that "They can't both be right," then our brains sometimes "show us reality" and Adams' theory refutes itself. If, on the other hand, Adams' theory is true, then he is not justified in his assertion that "They can't both be right." Nor is he justified in believing that his theory is true.

But I hasten to add that Adams' silly speculation about the brain and reality in no way detracts from his insights into Trump's modus operandi.

He understands that Trump is a negotiator who opens the bidding with an extreme offer so as to be in a position to dial it back to something reasonable. In this way he manages to mollify, to some extent at least, the extremists on his Right and those on his Left.

Every reasonable person must grant that there must be some restrictions placed on whom to allow to immigrate. Trump will alienate Muslims and leftists but he will also insure that what has already happened in Europe won't happen here.

You lefties need to cool your jets, to use an old '70s expression, and give the man a chance. The stroke you prevent may be your own. The more extreme and thuggish your protests, the more asinine your Hitler comparisons, the more you will discredit yourselves in the eyes of the sane.

Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?

This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth. Not that one should be a deflationist. But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.

There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true?

Sentence 'S' (in language L) is true iff S

and

The proposition that p is true iff p.

A Question About Alethic Relativism

Vlastimil V. inquires:

When someone says that (R) truth is relative,

a) … what's the most clear way to understand R?

I suppose he means something else than that people disagree, also something else than that truth is seldom certain.

b) … what's the most clear way to criticize R?

BV: (R) is a substantive and highly controversial thesis about the nature of truth. So it is not to be confused with the Moorean fact or datum that different people often have different beliefs about one and the same topic. Nor is it to be confused with any epistemological thesis about the knowledge of truth such as the thesis that nothing is known with certainty. For this latter thesis is consistent with truth being absolute. Fallibilism and absolutism are consistent. And of course, to hold as I do that truth is absolute (nonrelative) is not to hold that every truth is necessary. If a proposition is true, then it is absolutely true whether it is contingent or necessary. No matter how paltry the proposition — I had gyro meat with my eggs this morning — if true, then absolutely true.

Note that I would not speak, redundantly, of absolute truth were it not for the mischief caused by those who speak, incoherently, of relative truth. I would simply speak of truth. Truth is truth. There is no such animal as relative truth.

VV: Suppose the alethic relativist is fine acknowledging that, given R, (R1) R itself is a relative truth — as well as R1 (or any further meta-claim R2, R3, etc.). Once you provided an interesting retort: the alethic relativist "cannot say that … nonrelativism is only relatively true. If he said that, he would be assuming that relativism is nonrelatively true …" I don't follow this implication, so I would appreciate your further elaboration.

BV: If (R) is true, then it is either absolutely true or relatively true. If the former, then self-refererential inconsistency and self-refutation. So the relativist is forced to retreat, on pain of inconsistency, to (RR): It is relatively true that every truth is relative. But then I object that this cannot have any general or global application or relevance. "Fine, truth is relative for you and your pals, but this has nothing to do with me, and so I may reasonably ignore your quirky local view."

The point here is that the relative relativist cannot exclude the nonrelativist view: he must admit that it is possible that nonrelativism (NR) be nonrelatively true. But then the relative relativist seems to fall into contradiction inasmuch as he must embrace both limbs of the following inconsistent dyad:

It is possible that (NR) be true in every locality
It is impossible that (NR) be true in every locality.

Our relative relativist must embrace the first limb since he cannot logically exclude the possibility of the truth of (NR). And he must embrace the second limb because (NR) and (RR) cannot both be true in the relative relativist's locality.

The relative relativist confuses truth with local understanding. The relative relativist is a slippery fellow. It is not clear what he is up to, though one senses that he is up to no good. Is he simply changing the subject by speaking of local understanding rather than truth? Is he making an eliminativist move by denying that there is truth? Is he trying to reduce truth to local understanding? These are all dead ends.

VV: Also, once you wrote: "The aletheic relativist either asserts his thesis (R) as absolutely true or as relatively true. If the former, his thesis is self-refuting. If the latter, then his thesis avoids self-contradiction only to face a dilemma: either relative-truth is the same as the property of being-believed, or it is not. If the former, then the relativity of truth boils down to an uninteresting triviality. If the latter, then it remains wholly unclear what could be meant by the property of relative-truth, and the thesis (R) perishes of semantic indeterminacy."

What I'm wondering here about is whether the alethic relativist really cannot specify R non-trivially yet consistently.

BV: The following is an uninteresting triviality: one and the same proposition can be believed by one person but not believed by another. Let the proposition be: Hillary lied about Benghazi. Speaking loosely, once could say that the proposition is true-for Tom but not true-for Chelsea. This sloppy way of talking suggests that to be true = to be believed by someone. Now if the property of being true = the property of being believed by someone, then alethic relativism becomes trivially true.

But the thesis of althetic relativism is not trivially true. So what is truth for the alethic relativist if it is not the property of being believed by someone?

My challenge to the relativist: Tell us what you mean by 'truth' such that truth can be coherently conceived to be relative. If you cannot do this then you have no thesis.

A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One’s Values on Others

The following argument is sometimes heard. "Because values are relative, it is wrong to impose one's values on others."

But if values are relative, and among my values is the value of instructing others in the right way to live, then surely I am justified in imposing my values on others. What better justification could I have? If values are relative, then there is simply no objective basis for a critique or rejection of the values I happen to hold. For it to be wrong for me to impose my values, value-imposition would have to be a nonrelative disvalue. But this is precisely what is ruled out by the premise 'values are relative.'

Either values are relative or they are not. If they are relative then no one can be faulted for living in accordance with his values even if among his values is the value of imposing one's values on others. If, on the other hand, values are not relative, then one will be in a position to condemn some forms of value-imposition. The second alternative, however, is not available to one who affirms the relativity of all values.

Persons who give the above argument are trying to have it both ways at once, and in so doing fall into self-contradiction. They want the supposed benefits of believing that values are relative — such supposed benefits as toleration — while at the same time committing themselves to the contradictory proposition that some values are not relative by their condemnation of value-imposition.

One sees from this how difficult it is for relativists to be consistent. A consistent relativist cannot make any such pronouncement as that it is wrong to impose one's values on others; all he can say is that from within his value scheme it is wrong to impose one's values on others. But then he allows the possibility that there are others for whom value-imposition is the right thing to do.

Relativism, whether alethic or axiological, is curiously self-vitiating. To be consistent, the relativist must acquiesce in the relativization of his own position. For example, the value relativist must admit that is only from within his own value scheme that it is wrong to impose one's value on others. To which my response will be: That's nice; but what does that have to do with me? The relativist can get my attention only if he appeals to nonrelative values, value binding on all of us; but if does so, then he contradicts himself.

Lies, Truth, Narratives, and Hillary

Hillary Clinton we now know to be a liar beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt. A liar is one who habitually makes false statements with the intention of deceiving her audience. This definition, however, presupposes the distinction between true and false statements. Aphoristically: no truth, no lies. Hillary cannot be a liar unless there is truth. But maybe there is no truth, only narratives. Here, perhaps, is a way to defend Hillary. Perhaps the outrageous things she says are merely parts of her narrative. So consider:

N. There is no truth; there are only narratives.

It follows that (N) itself is only a narrative, or part of one. For if there is no truth, then (N) cannot be true. Is this a problem? I should think so. Suppose you want to persuade me to accept (N). How will you proceed? You can't say I ought to accept (N) because it is true. Will you say that I ought to accept (N) because it is 'empowering'? But it cannot BE empowering unless it is TRUE that it is empowering. You cannot, however, invoke truth on pain of falling into inconsistency. No matter which predicate you substitute for 'empowering,' you will face the same difficulty. If you recommend (N) on the ground that it is F, then you must say that (N) IS F, which leads right back to truth.

Being and truth are systematically connected. The truth is the truth about what IS, and what IS is at least possibly such as to be the subject matter of truths. (A classical theist can go whole hog here and say: necessarily, whatever IS is the subject matter of truths, and every truth is about something that IS. But I am not assuming classical theism in this entry.)

So you can't say that (N) is empowering or conducive to winning the election or whatever; all you can say is that it is part of your narrative that (N) is empowering, or conducive . . . . In this way you box yourself in: there is nothing you say that can BE the case; everything is a narrative or part of a narrative. But you cannot even say that. You cannot say that everything you say IS a narrative, only that it is part of your narrative that everything you say is a narrative. You are sinking into some seriously deep crapola in your attempt to defend the indefensible, Hillary.

It follows from this that you cannot budge your sane opponent who holds that there is truth and that some narratives are true and others are false. I am one of these sane people. You cannot budge me because, according to MY narrative, there is truth and not all narratives are true. According to my narrative, my narrative is not just a narrative. It answers to a higher power, Truth. The only way you could budge me from my position is by appealing to truth transcendent of narrative. And that you cannot do.

So what is a poor leftist to do? Fall into inconsistency, which is in fact what they do. Everything is a mere narrative except when it suits them to appeal to what is the case.

It is of the essence of the contemporary Left to attempt the replacement of truth by narrative, a replacement they cannot pull off without inconsistency.

What if the lefty embraces inconsistency? Then, while resisting the temptation to release the safety on your 1911, you walk away, as from a block of wood. You can't argue with a block of wood or a shithead. While shit has form, it lacks form supportive of rational discourse.