Objective Truth: Nature and Necessity

A popular view among many people today is that all truth is relative; no truth is objective. By objective is meant true by means independent of the person asserting any truth-claim.

For example, if someone says, “Fish is my favorite meat” that statement would be true relative to the experience of the speaker. In contrast, if someone should say, “All living things have encoded biological information in their DNA” that statement would not be relative to the speaker’s perception for it would be true regardless of who made the statement.

Objective truth then, is truth beyond mere opinion. It is truth verifiable and undeniable as fact by rational beings other than the one making the claim.

Strangely then, despite so much talk about living in an Age of Science & Technology that is remarkable, the belief is so common that ‘all truth is relative’. Indeed, this notion prevails not only in the marketplace but in college and university classrooms. Lecturers and students alike articulate this view openly and even repeatedly, dogmatically.

But happily, there are some thinkers who have not succumbed to this flawed philosophical posturing. For example, Alan Bloom in his excellent analysis of the issue in The Closing of the American Mind believes that the issue persists simply because people have been “indoctrinated”. He says, “…there is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion…they have been indoctrinated.” (pages 25-26)

Indoctrinated? Yes, indoctrinated academically by means of textbooks, lectures and some seminars, and publicly by the ‘big’ media. Therefore, when certain questions of truth-claims are posited they flounder and fail logically.

For example, let us consider this ‘hot button’ question: Is it true or not that most homosexual or ‘gay’ men have a penchant for unprotected, anonymous and promiscuous anal sex? Without objective truth how does one decide?

Here is another challenging question: Is the universe eternal and so without beginning? Many atheists claim that the universe is eternal thus the notion of a Creator-God is nonsensical. However, agnostic Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow identifies “Five independent lines of evidence—the motion of the galaxies, the discovery of the primordial fireball, the law of thermodynamics, the abundance of helium in the universe and the life story of the stars” and so based on those findings he concludes that all such evidence “point to one conclusion; all indicate that the Universe had a beginning.” (In his God and the Astronomers, 2nd edition, 1992, p. 103)

To comment on the issue under discussion in brutally blunt terms, university students and lecturers who continue to assert, “there is no such thing as objective truth” are philosophical juveniles.

That’s an arrogant statement you say. I agree it is but is it true or false? Prove it minus objective truth.

And as the attempt is made to formulate a factual response, permit me somewhat mischievously to modify and apply the insightful words of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill with reference to my beloved homeland Jamaica “You can’t build a marble [country] from a mixture of [intellectual] mud and manure.”