Relative Truth

"What is your answer to someone who believes truth to be relative?" (From discussion group on facebook.com.)

I hope you don't mind me responding to some of your comments. The thread seems to be progressing very slowly. I obviously couldn't extrapolate on Father Johnny's comments as I wouldn't know where he would go with them, but hopefully my comments will still add something useful. Please don't take this in any offensive way; I fully respect you as a sister I love and though our viewpoints may differ, I am only trying to provide light to the situation and not condemn you in any way.

You made it clear that you believe that truth is relative, however, relative truth is something that cannot be honestly rationalized. That might seem to be a strange statement to make considering that most people who cling to the notion of relative truth consider themselves to be intellectuals, however, it is quite easy to demonstrate.

Strictly speaking, any attempt to rationalize relative truth comes with an insurmountable paradox. Honest rationalization requires faithful adherence to the laws of logic. One of these is the law (or principle) of contradiction. The idea of absolute truth is really just a rewording of this law. The law of contradiction is the notion that two contradictory ideas cannot simultaneously be true. That is, there is one, and only one ultimate truth and not multiple contradictory truths. Therefore, the process of rationalization itself requires a prerequisite of the existence of absolute truth.

If the principle of contradiction is removed from logic, in essence removing absolute truth from the prerequisites of logic, we encounter a separate problem. Without this principle nothing is reliable: contradictory ideas may be simultaneously true, thus a single idea may be simultaneously true and false (additionally violating the principle of identity, another fundamental law of logic); thus, nothing is ultimately determinable and all logic is unreliable. So even removing absolute truth from the requirements of logic does not cause relative truth to be rationally determined; it simply provides that nothing can be determined, effectively destroying logic and rational thought. It could be extrapolated that because of this, logic itself is an illusion, but this comes with the paradox that you must insert absolute truth (i.e. the law of contradiction) for reliable logic to form such an extrapolation, thereby voiding that extrapolation and, for the same reason, any other potentially useful extrapolations of this idea.

At first I thought that by relative truth, you really meant relative morality. Relative morality is an entirely different creature, one which can be rationalized...provided God does not exist. However, though it may be rationally attainable, it has no positive application (unless the ability to rationalize unconditional selfishness is a positive).

I have programmed computers for about 20 years, and have become very adept at the application of logic. For about 10 of those years, I wrestled internally with merging science and religion...as they both cannot be correct if they are contradictory; one has to take precedence and I chose science. I effectively operated at the level of theistic evolutionist, but I was aware that the cruel, wasteful and ultimately ineffective god of theistic evolution was intellectually indistinguishable to no God at all (and I acted that way). I could go into gruesome detail about the destructive logic attainable from this position, but what happened afterward is more important.

It wasn't until I applied the idea that God is as described in the Bible to real life, that everything began making sense. Morality makes sense. Suffering and evil make sense. Even scientific issues make more sense. Granted, I had to discard some mainstream scientific conclusions which rely on the effective nonexistence of God like the big bang and abiogenesis, but none of those ideas are particularly useful anyway except in intellectual discussion and scifi plot lines. I've never really seen a whole lot of things I would call "mysteries" in the Bible, but that's because I've always understood that the Bible only makes sense with the understanding of God existing as described in the Bible, even during my acceptance of the god of theistic evolution. Think of it as suspension of disbelief; it's like viewing Star Trek and suspending disbelief in aliens (especially Q), except it was the Bible and I suspended my disbelief in God as described therein. (And today I can still suspend disbelief in the big bang, etc. to enjoy a scifi every now and again.)

Christianity can be brutally rational because there is no logical or scientific reason that the God of the Bible not existing holds any merit over Him existing and things really do make more sense if He does exist. But if, held as prerequisite that God does not exist (or is ineffectual as the god of an evolutionary world), good and evil have absolutely no rational basis (hence, general societal confusion on the issue) and the only brutally rational moral system of which I'm aware is hedonism. When faced with the option of throwing out a few useless scientific conclusions or throwing out all reasoning behind morality and all rational explanations for evil and suffering, I'm choosing the first and I believe I am rational in doing so.

As far as the "average Joe" is concerned, it seems to me that he's already figured out the rationality of hedonism (you can apply a nicer term here if you like, but "pleasure-seeking as the highest goal" is my meaning, not some official doctrine or anything) as that's where society seems to be heading, and with hardly a church to tell them otherwise it's no wonder. Church after church is effectively conceding that the God of the Bible does not exist by conceding to the god of theistic evolution, who is NOT the same being. Mainstream scientists (at least prevalent atheist ones) are correctly explaining to the masses how that god is worthless. And everyone is calling both the same thing, "God." I've always held that at least on an individual basis, the general public is more intelligent than many give credit, but like any information processing machine, "garbage in, garbage out."

Where Did Evil Come From?

Below is a post I made in a forum previously. I thought it was pretty good and so I'm pasting it in here too.

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There are essentially two types of evil (per the dictionary definition of "evil"), suffering and immorality. Suffering is a consequence of immorality (hence both have ultimately the same source). Immorality is any disobedience to God. All immorality is a decision because we are capable of doing, or not doing, all that God has dictated for us to do and not do. This ability to make moral decisions is, of course, what we call free will. Thus, the ability to choose evil is enabled in every being capable of free will.

The ultimate root of all evil is this: Pride. The first commandment ever broken by any sinner and the only commandment which is necessarily broken every time any commandment is broken is the first. The first commandment is often broken several times just deciding to break another commandment. Pride is the direct violation of the first commandment because if you believe your opinions can be placed above God’s Word, you are holding yourself higher than the Almighty.

Angels have free will too. In all of God’s creation, only one entity with free will (out of all the angels plus 2 humans) is known to have decided to sin without external temptation; how good a creation it must have been! And his first sin also must have been pride (via the logic above). Your question, Father Johny, was, "But how, pray, did it arise in the mind of Lucifer to do such a thing?" At some point this question entered his head, "Are you better than God?" And he sinned by deciding that he was. At minimum, God set up Lucifer’s existence in such a way that he would have eventually asked himself this; at maximum, God asked him the question directly. Either way, why would God put such a question into his mind? Perhaps it was to test him. Did God know he would fail? There is no alternative but that he must have known.

Then Lucifer enters history in the serpent of Genesis, tempting the lady with none other than pride, "when you eat of it...you will be like God." Through Adam's sin at this temptation passed on to him by Eve were he and all of his righteously cursed by the Almighty, hence all our suffering. We make it worse every day by continuing to be prideful and continuing to sin in every manner under Heaven. Every manner of suffering ultimately goes back to some cause of immorality (some more directly than others). I believe it was Paul who said that the entirety of creation groans because of this curse. Could God have stopped Lucifer from tempting Eve or her from tempting Adam? Certainly. Did God know Adam would fail the temptation passed to him by Eve and He would be forced by His own infinite justice to curse the world? He wouldn't be God if he didn't.

It all comes back to the main group topic, the confusion of why. Why would a loving God create a world He knew was destined to be cursed by His own mouth? He did it for us. For you, Father Johnny, and you, my wonderful sister Moniqua, and for me. You see, He wants us to know Him. He wants us to see His absolute justice and terrible wrath; without this curse, we could never have known Him this way. He wants us to know His incomparable jealousy, but how could we have known that if we had never put anything above Him? He wants us to know His infinite mercy and unimaginable love, such that He sent His Son, God, to suffer and die for all our sins and without our sins, we could never have known Him this way. He wants us to know His incredible forgiveness, but how could we have been forgiven had we never strayed. And His forgiveness is unlike that of anyone; He forgave us before He even created us, knowing that we would sin. He forgives us before we even ask Him to forgive us. All we have to do is love Him and choose Him and he will free us from all bonds. And compared to an eternity in the perfect world he plans for us, a few thousand years in this cursed world is not even a blinking of an eye (though it does seem like a long time when you're only twenty something).

Much of this may not mesh well with those who are not young earth creationists because of the alternate position that the fossil record contains history of millions of years of suffering before humans came about, much less sinned (instead of being a vivid reminder of God's terrible wrath executed in the flood). Though I would beckon any Christian who is not a young earth creationist to find out who it is that they are elevating above God and His Word (thereby breaking the first commandment), for God, Himself, said as recorded in Exodus (among many times in the Bible): "in six days Yahweh made the heavens, earth and sea and all that these contain." Besides that, the evolutionary worldview does not answer any ultimate question of where anything came from and doesn't even support the concept of evil, so a discussion of "Where did evil come from?" couldn't possibly make sense from that view anyways.