Contra Relativism

My politically southpawed pal Xerxes has declared of late that he knows nothing for certain. “I am absolutely sure that I can’t be absolutely sure of anything anymore. Life evolves. Knowledge changes. Sooner or later, everything I’m sure of will require reconsideration.”

To the contrary, as Aquinas would say, I maintain there are a series of truths that are self-evident and undeniable:

The truths of mathematics. Two and two will always equal four. The Pythagorean theorem will hold in all relevant cases.

Logical truths. Both A and not-A cannot simultaneously be true. If B follows from A, and C from B, then C follows from A. And so on.

Ethical truths. Kant’s categorical imperative, the golden rule. Although there can be argument over specific cases, we all know in our conscience that all are created equal, and that murder or lying, for example, are morally wrong.

The intrinsic value of truth, good, and beauty. The transcendentals.

Aside from the many other formal proofs of the existence of God, I think it is close to self-evident to the light of reason that there is a complex pattern and organization to the natural world, which forces the conclusion that there is an intelligence that designed it. Therefore, the existence of God seems like certain knowledge, even though some claim to dispute it.

Even were this not so as a logical proposition, the existence of God can be directly experienced, in such a way that it is known with certainty, whether or not one can convey this experience and this certainty to anyone else. Being able to convey this truth is a separate matter from the knowledge itself: I can be certain that I love my wife, without necessarily being able to convince her of this.

From this set of propositions—perhaps there are more self-evident truths that I overlook here, but from these alone—a great deal more can be reliable deduced to be true.

Counter to this, Xerxes cites Heisenberg’s “uncertainly principle” as proving that nothing is certain.

Heisenberg’s principle refers to a specific problem in observing subatomic structures. To apply it outside this context is not legitimate. That is like saying, for a random analogy, that because jaywalking is illegal, all possible human actions are illegal. At most, it tends to throw into doubt the scientistic notion that science is capable of discovering all truth: an unscientific and philosophically false idea in any case.

The same is so for the observer paradox, which Xerxes goes on to cite. This is a problem for science, in its claim of objectivity, not for ontology or for epistemology.

It can indeed be argued that science has little necessary relation to truth in the first place. As Popper, for example, has argued recently, or as did Copernicus at its origin.

Xerxes goes on to endorse what he calls “both/and” reasoning over “either/or.” He seems to here be directly rejecting Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction: that both A and not A cannot simultaneously be true. This is a non-starter. Some choices, of course, are not binary; but even such more complex choices, as we can see from computer architecture, are built on prior binary choices. Consider for analogy a Xerxian computer in which each bit was not either 1 or 0, but both 1 and 0 at the same time. It is intrinsically nonsensical, of course, when so graphically illustrated. And of course, no such computer would function. So too with human judgement.

Which I suspect is the underlying point, here and so often with leftward thought: the motive is a desire to escape all moral judgements. Xerxes goes on, not for the first time, to speak against conventional morality, conventional ideas of good and evil, on the premise that things like water, science, or fossil fuels, are in themselves neither good or bad. Rather, what matters is that they be in the right proportion. Too little water kills; so does too much. And so forth.

This idea of “everything in moderation,” however, cannot work. Because it is immediately self-contradictory: too much moderation is itself immoderate. Moreover, why is moderation preferable? Because it produces good? But then aren’t you being immoderate if you always choose the good?

Xerxes is misrepresenting conventional morality in the first place in implying that it holds anything to be intrinsically evil. God created all things; it follows that all things are intrinsically good. However, you must integrate this with the idea of hierarchy; not all things are equally good. Otherwise there is no way of settling on the "right" proportion of anything. What is right depends on what the goal is—and the goal must itself therefore be seen as having an intrinsic value greater than other possible goals.

Moral judgements are therefore not properly applied to things as things, but to human thoughts or actions. Here it is essential to make moral judgements. Murder is evil; even a little bit of it is evil. Hate is evil; even a little bit of it is evil. Conversely, there is no such thing as too much love of God. Self-evidently, too much good (or virtue) does not become evil. One can argue otherwise, but only by falsifying the proper meaning of “virtue” or “good.” More broadly, evil consists in preferring a lesser to a greater good.

One more typical left-wing thought from Xerxes: he writes that “Individuals are in some way the sum of their relationships.”

That is dangerously misleading without an explicit reference to one’s relationship with God. It is ultimately only this relationship that counts, as any mystic will tell you, and other relationships are of value only to the extent that they conform to this one. Otherwise Xerxes’s ethic here is to “go along to get along,” which is the broad and level road to Hell. It is the ethic that sustained Nazi Germany, or that sustains the Mafia.