Truth & Lies
A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it.
The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.
http://www.thearrogantatheist.com/menstruthimage.html
Is this really true? Is truth independent of people’s beliefs? 2 + 2 = 4 is true whether you believe it or not. Is there a world, a system out there where 2 + 2 does not equal 4? What if, in that system, 2 + 2 = 0? What if that system were internally consistent so that 4 X 2 = 10 or something like that, and, sure enough, whenever you added 2 + 2 it always comes to zero in that system. Of course, the concept of zero is the real issue here and not its representation using that circle thing. No way are we claiming that there can be any system where “2″ – which represents two objects – - when added to another “2″ equals nothing. That’s confusing the representation of a concept using symbols (numbers) with the concept itself. So, yeah, 2 + 2, no matter how it may be represented, that is, when we have the addition of objects of quantity X with objects of quantity Y, we will not get zero (assuming we are dealing with positive numbers. Negative numbers, well, that really effs things up, conceptually, since, how can you have a negative quantity of something. What does -2 (negative 2) apples look like when it is in your hand?).
Anyway, what about “All men are created equal”? Is that true even if no one believes it? Was it true during the times of the Mycenaeans? What about pre-enlightenment time, you know, before the time we held these truths to be self-evident? (ANd what the heck does THAT mean? If the truth was self-evident, then why didn’t people “see” it all the time? Why did it take, like 2000 years to find this self-evident truth?)
I think there’s a level of arrogance (maybe hubris is the right word here) to think that something is true even if nobody believes it. It’s the kid’s taunt of “I know something you don’t know.” But aren’t there non-mathematical truths that are, well, just true even if nobody believes them? Say, like, everybody is born from a woman? Seems to me that that’s true for all times. But what about those self-evident truths? Did they always exist independently of us and, during the times of Ancient Rome, they were too busy conquering and stuff and didn’t have the time to think about this self-evident stuff but, once we had people like Locke and Descartes and others, who spent time thinking about this stuff, that’s when it become self-evident? Will there come a time when these truths are no longer self-evident? Then what? Do they stop being true?
Boy…I feel I boxed myself into a corner with this stuff. I’m stuck within a loop.
The following are not part of this document but I thought may be of interest to readers.
- Definition of Truth from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- What is Epistemology? Philosophy of Truth, Knowledge, Belief
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