Is Truth Relative?

You have no idea how crucial clear and concise communication is when discussing Christianity. Or, for that matter, any time you speak with another person entirely. Anytime you encounter someone who disagrees with you. But honing in on Christianity as the topic, not only are the definitions of the very words you use valuable, but a clear understanding of what Truth is like is even more valuable. Why do you say? Today, we will discuss whether all truth claims are purely subjective and thus are justified regardless of their content or the person who holds them to be true. Are individuals the arbiters of truth? Do humans decide what is actually true and not? Well, as you will see shortly, this just reveals a misunderstanding of the nature of Truth itself.

What is Truth?

Before we even dive into the types of truth and whether one truth claim can be proven false, we must know what "Truth" is. The textbook definition of the word "truth" is that which corresponds and agrees with facts and reality. For example, "pink highlighters deposit pink ink on paper." Am I saying something true or false? Keep in mind that for this claim to be false, the pink highlighter would have to deposit a different color on paper instead of pink. Now, we are also assuming that the Dollar General employee didn't sell me rigged highlighters; the claim would be falsifiable, in other words, we can test the highlighter and see if it deposits pink ink or not. When we test the highlighter and discover it deposits pink ink, we can conclude the claim is true. So if the truth is that which agrees with reality, then what we are actually observing is Antithesis. Or, A is A, and if you have A, it is not non-A. In simpler terms, the pink highlighter that deposits pink ink does not deposit a color that is not pink.

Who Decides Truth?

I can already hear what some are thinking, "But what about personal opinions!" Why, I'm glad you just asked, because that is the next topic. The Truth that I just mentioned above is what is called Objective Truth: Truth that is grounded in an object. An example of an objective truth would be that my car is red. The truth of the claim is grounded in the object of my car; we can go and look at my car to see if it really is red. Well, I can assure you that my little Honda Civic is, in fact, red and looks a lot like this car below.

But there is another type of truth, called Subjective Truth: Truth that is grounded in a subject. An example of a subjective truth claim is that my Honda Civic is the coolest, most awesome car ever! That claim cannot be falsified by examining the object of my car, because another person may not like Honda cars, period. These types of claims are solely grounded in the taste and experience of the subject, in this case, another person and me. I guess a good way of differentiating between the two is where they are pointed and where their direction of focus lies (focus for justification). Objective claims go outward of the subject making it with the focus on the object.

Objective claims are grounded in objects, not subjects. Words used, such as "is," following the noun Honda Civic, focus the claim of the car, not on the person making the claim. In this case, my car can be seen as red.

Contrasted to a subjective truth claim that is always directed at the individual making the claim, or the subject.

The claim made here makes listeners look at the subject for the justification, and hence, the claim is not falsifiable by looking at an object. The person making the claim justifies it themselves, not the car in question.

If individuals actually created truth, then my car would not be red all the time. A person's beliefs and opinions do not change whether an objective truth is true or not. There must be two types of truth.

Why Does it Matter?

Why does this matter? Why can't I just believe my own truth? Relativism has plagued our culture, starting with philosophers such as Hegel (1770 - 1831) introduced the "synthesis" of truth by individuals via experience, and such. Without going on a tangent, I must mention that this fall in justified truth was ultimately because of a fundamental abandonment of God, which resulted in men themselves abandoning reasoning, given there's no grounding for such to be objective anyway, since no God exists. Though they spoke more of moral synthesis than anything, nonetheless, as we have just seen, simply brushing objective truth to the side does not cut.

In the following, I will include some dialogue points wth explanations. It is my deepest hope that none of these offend you, because some may contain controversial topics, but they are plaguing younger generations with confusion on basic truths (those which can be easily obtained by basic observation and experience), and thus must be discussed here. So claims come from subjects; that is a given. But that does not immediately entail that truth is subjective solely because subjects can make claims about it. Rather, as I have demonstrated, the claims can be of two types: grounded in the object (Objective Truth) and those grounded in subjects (Subjective Truth). Well, I am confident that we have a clear understanding of Truth now, so let's examine some claims that are so popular in culture, which tell our young people that all claims and truth are subjective.

Examining Claims from the Culture

"That may be true for you, but it's not for me." Okay, is that true? If truth is relative, then the main claim relativism makes is that there is no truth, but an issue arises. The claim of relativism itself claims to be an absolute, objective truth that nobody can deny, which directly contradicts the claim of the view. We can conclude that relativism makes no sense, it's logically contradictory, and should not be taken as objective, because of the very nature of relativism.

Now imagine a girl named Sally says, "I don't like the Ford Pinto, those cars are dangerous because they have terrible gas tank locations that catch fire when rear-ended." Did she make an objective or a subjective claim? Well, both! She says that she doesn't like the Ford Pinto, which is grounded in her opinion on the car, which someone else may like. But the second part of her claim, that the car is dangerous because of the gas tank location, we can look at the car getting rear-ended and see if the gas tank really does pose a danger to passengers in the car. A person may still agree with her that the car is dangerous, but still ignore that in favor of looks or another subjective aspect. Now, what if Sally says something like, "I am a male." That claim is not grounded in her opinion about herself; she may feel like she is a male, or think she is, but opinions and the human imagination are not perfect; they can fail. We can examine her body and see if she is, in fact, a male. When we discover that she does not bear any human male characteristics, we can conclude that the claim is false and that Sally really is a Girl. There are 6,500+ documented biological differences between men and women. When we examine Sally's light-receiving cells, we see they are sensitive to color, as opposed to a man's cells being sensitive to movement and tracking it. There are 6,499 more I could list.

Some people nowadays have attempted to create a new form of thinking about biological sex and gender, by claiming that gender is a mental view of yourself, while sex is biological, and that people who believe they are the other gender are just that: mentally the other gender. This seems to make good-hearted sense, until we see that gender and sex have been used synonymously in literature, both layman and medical, for millennia, until recently. But then, when the person believes they are fully the opposite gender, they require an operation or medication that alters the object of their bodies. How does that even justify thinking gender is purely a mental construct and not an objective fact about the human physical state? If a person really was that gender by thinking it, then why do they need physical alteration? We do not allow people to get amputated when they have healthy limbs because they think they don't need a leg! And altering the sex organs through physically painful surgeries with extremely long and risky recovery that requires lifetime pain killers and medication is the same as chopping off your leg because you think you don't need it; it's grounded in the object of your body.

Or what if someone says, "A Fetus is not a human life." We can examine a human in the fetal stage of development and see if it really is a human life. To make this argument stronger, let's go back further to the zygote stage. Is it a human life? The zygote is made of cells, and we would be in some deep, mucky water to deny that a cell is not alive; thus, the zygote itself is obviously alive. If it were not alive, it would not need nutrients to grow according to the genetic code it has, a characteristic of things that are alive. Moreover, it meets all seven criteria for life. Well, considering the zygote contains an entire genome that is unique not just to the zygote, but also to humans, we can confidently say that it is a human-type life. If it weren't a human life, it would not contain the human genome. So we can falsify that claim by looking at the zygote, or fetus, to conclude that it is by all measures other than philosophical commitment to not realizing one's moral state with God a human life. The claim itself has no direction towards the opinion of the subjectee, no more than the subjectee being responsible for formulating it. The direction of justification is at the fetus, so a response like "it's my opinion" doesn't cut it. Though you still have the free will to abandon reason to justify your sin.

Now this topic has enough to talk about to write a book, and many have (phew, that saves me some time!), so I don't think there is a need for me to continue with this exact topic. My point here is that Truth is not relative, but there is Objective Truth, and God is one of them!

The Big Objective Claim

Is the claim of God's existence subjective? Many in our pluralistic culture would say, of course, and that all gods may be real for all they care. But this does not really look at the claim closely enough, doesn't even look at it for a second. If a person says that all gods are real, they either (1) actually hold that belief and thus need advice, or (2) do not actually believe there is a God, but that useful delusions may be helpful. The first needs to be reminded that all gods existing doesn't make sense. The God of Islam and Christianity is an infinite being. If you are going to say that both can exist at once, you are asking for two separate infinite beings to exist. They would be two different beings, but both infinite. But an infinite being contains everything, and cannot lack anything, so to have two infinite beings would be impossible, because one would have to have something the other lacks to not be one being. There can only be one infinite being. And if all religions are the same God, you haven't read or researched any religion because they all have contradictory or different views of God. It's either one is right, or they're all wrong.

Apart from arguing down that path, we can easily think about this differently. If God exists, then He created the universe. Got me? Okay, now if God created the universe, does that make Him real or not? If God is real, would a claim about Him be grounded not in Him? Do you see where I'm going? The claim "God does not exist" is not subjective; it is a truth claim about reality itself, for God is the being from which all would come.

Conslusion

If truth were relative, then claims about it would not have an alternative to be grounded in objects, isolated from subjects, which entails that the subject's beliefs and opinions cannot change it. I hope this short and informative piece on the nature of truth claims helps you in the discovery of it. I pray that the LORD Jesus Christ may open your eyes to the truth of His creation, that the very existence of God is objective, that either God does exist, or he doesn't, but He cannot exist and not-exist at the same time.