by Lethargio

Created on: June 26, 2008

The absolute nature of truth.

Truth is nothing more or less than reality captured and understood correctly. In this sense it can only be absolute, but this does not mean that truth is attainable in its entirety. At the present we have what I would call "partial truths" just like the "partial theories" on science. A partial truth is a conclusion, observation or interpretation on some aspect of the universe that is correct in its isolated sense. An example of this is "Two planes were propelled into the world trade centre on the 11th of September 2001", but as you can see it neither mentions any build up or following consequence; it just happened. This is a small way to present partial truth, another way is through facts. The way plants respire is through a process called photosynthesis. The earth is 4 and a half billion years old. Human beings have existed in their present state for around 200, 000 years. Facts are little pieces of truth that are in themselves useless in a big way; the only real function of them is to build fact upon fact, theory upon theory so that we have one complete picture of reality that we can call "true" and this would be an absolute truth because it involves, explains and communicates the nature, state, and even maybe reason the universe exists. Absolute truth is, as I have said, nothing more than an understanding of reality.

Its plain to see from that brief look at the nature and use of truth that it cannot be by its nature or essence conditional; a conditional truth is not a truth if it is not set in stone, we could re-label "conditional truth" as "what seems at present to be truth", and from this the idea that truth as a totality is conditional is obscene. Conditional truth would mean the universe is conditional.

Truth, as a totality, is a conclusion. Facts and theories are a process to reaching this conclusion. It is the same with any conclusion; if from an experiment I discover that a fossil is a million years old, then this conclusion is absolute as long as the method i used was a correct one. But even if i had used the wrong method i would know that this fossil still had an age, an absolute age that could be no other. Here we meet again the absurdity of a conditional truth, as conditional truth cannot be explained through a method (right or wrong) and cannot be said to explain reality in a conclusive way. Thus, we can throw out the idea that truth is at all conditional, and we can realize that reality has indeed an absolute truth behind it, or to re-phrase; an absolute system of its reality. whether we can grasp it is another matter; whether it exists is unquestionable.

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