In the last blog post, I started discussing what’s happened to truth today in our society. Absolute/objective truth (a correspondence to reality) has been overshadowed by a new type of truth – relative/subjective truth in which each person or group of people has individual truths. Let’s take a look now at the problems with this relativism, which is so prevalent in our society today.
First of all, an easy criticism has to do with the fact that it is self-refuting. Think about somebody who tells you he or she can’t speak a word of English but uses English to tell you that. You can see the confusion with that claim. Or somebody else says that each sentence in English must be shorter than two words. Again, there’s a problem here because the person took more than two words to give you that sentence. In each case you notice that what he or she says defeats the point the person was trying to make. This is what I mean by saying some statements are self-refuting.
So now let’s look at self-defeating comments made by somebody who is a relativist when it comes to truth. “All truth is relative.” But this statement claims to be true for all people, which is an absolute statement. Here’s another one – “There are no absolutes.” But again, this is an absolute statement. Someone may say, “That’s true for you, but not for me.” That individual has made a claim that is true for both people. Then there’s this one – “There’s no such thing as truth.” See the problem? That’s a true statement. One more – “We can’t know anything about God.” However, that is a statement about what we can know about God.
Watch for these self-refuting statements from modern-day truth skeptics. They will make such skeptical statements, but their claims are blanket statements which they believe apply to everyone in the world. Probably the most blatant example of self-refutation has to do with individuals who write books supporting their belief in relativism. Why in the world would they write books for everybody if they think there’s no such thing as truth for everybody?
Okay, more to come with problems for relativists in a future blog post.
