(October 9, 2015 at 11:53 pm)Tartarus Sauce Wrote:(October 3, 2015 at 4:50 pm)Delicate Wrote: In a different thread, an atheist indicated that absolute truth is a difficult view to give up. He's right.
But it's worse than that: It's impossible to give up absolute truth.
The reason is, in any conceivable universe, operating under any given specification of natural laws, if we reject absolute truth, we reject the ability to say anything meaningful about these possible universes. The very claim "In universe1 there are no absolute truths" is either true or false, and absolutely so. Once you jettison absolute truth, your statements about this possible universe become meaningless.
But the problem goes further than that. If you simply want to reject absolute truths in our world, you demolish the foundations of reason and science, which are irreparably dependent on absolute truth.
Hitting closer to home, the claim "There are no absolute truths" held as a claim cannot be rationally affirmed or denied if it is true.
Thus, atheists cannot escape absolute truths, on any level.
Your argument seems to imply that atheism's validity requires absolute truth to be an invalid proposition. In reality, what is more practically pertinent than the existence of absolute truth is whether its verification is even achievable.
Can we, as humans, authenticate statements or concepts as absolutely true? How could we know? If we can't obtain absolute truth, is the question of whether it exists even relevant?
I don't hold that atheism requires one to reject absolute truth. At least I'm not convinced of that yet.
I just know it's fashionable in some skeptical circles to reject the notion of absolute truth. Looking at some of the comments in this thread, it's obvious there are some who aren't happy about it.
