RELATIVISM----THE VIDEO (8 min) BELOW IS A DEBATE WITH A PHILOSOPHER BY THE NAME OF GREGORY KOUKL . HIS OPPONENT IS A MAN OF THE BAHAI FAITH BY THE NAME OF KENNETH BOWERS Before I go much further I want to say that I believe Pluralization is a good thing: a competing number of worldviews available with none dominant. In a world like this, you cannot avoid this. We must accept it and learn to respect the individual and engage the idea. We keep people in their equality, but ideas in their hierarchy. “Where else but in Los Angeles can you find a Korean selling kosher tacos?” I am only trying to point out bad reasoning especially living in a society where so much has become relative. Truth is under attack. We are a people with our feet firmly planted in mid air. Why do you look both ways before you cross the road? Because you hold to a Real World view of truth. We know that reality dictates the truth of the matter in such circumstances. If you cross the street without looking both ways and in reality a Mack truck is barreling down the road and runs over you, your physical appearance is going to change quite a bit. Reality will hurt. Reality is what you bump up against when your beliefs are false. In the case of the Mack truck, reality is what runs you over, chews you up, and spits you out when your beliefs are false. To say that truth does not exist is to simply make yet another truth claim and this nullifies any claim against the existence of truth, does it not? And to claim that all truth is ‘perspectival’ in nature is to once again make a claim that you want others to believe is NOT simply coming from your own perspective. When someone says that all truth depends on your point of view, they want us to believe that this statement is true and not simply their point of view! See the problem? And to say that we simply cannot know the truth, even if it exists objectively, is to once again make a self-refuting claim. How can we know that we cannot know? If certainty is impossible, then how can we be certain that certainty is impossible? Are you starting to understand the silliness of all of this? So, How Do We Know If Something Is True? Philosophers have been thinking about this for some time and the traditional analysis of knowledge is usually described in the following way: ----Knowledge = Properly Justified True Belief I have alot more to say but I am tired and will end with this. I can’t ‘know’ that there is a God unless I believe that God exists. But my belief is simply not enough; it is insufficient. You and I can both believe things that are simply untrue. It is possible for us to have false beliefs. And people who believe something that is false often think that they KNOW it. But there is a difference between ‘believing’ and ‘knowing’ in this context. You may ‘believe’ something that is false, but you can’t genuinely ‘know’ something that is false. Now think about this for a minute. We may ‘know’ OF something that is false, but what we ‘know’ is that it IS false! To actually ‘know’ something is to ‘know’ that it is TRUE. And you and I can’t actually ‘know’ something to be true unless it actually IS true. In other words, we can’t ‘know’ something unless it is NOT false.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:11:03 +0000
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