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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5081209" data-attributes="member: 4937">At some point, you ought to admit to yourself that you are not as omniscient in understanding as you would like to believe and that there are many matters and perhaps every matter that will escape your full comprehension.Generally, the more you learn, the more quickly you hit upon this revelation whether the thing you are learning about is physics or theology.Yet, for every manner of learning, I think we can aspire to 'functional truths' - that is, we know first how little we can know, but we can still hope to know something sufficiently for it to be useful to us.&nbsp; Functional truths may be all that we can ever grasp, but in my opinion, the very existance of functional truths means that not everything is subjective and over some horizon we may never reach there is something objective.I think where the absolutist side tends to go astray is asserting that they have encompassed objective truth completely, and that they therefore may be a reliable fount of it.&nbsp; This is supremely arrogant, as it doesn't take much study of anything to realize that a lifetime isn't enough to understand anything fully.&nbsp; Conversely, I think where relativist side goes astray is making the claim that since all truth is percieved by insufficient minds and faculties of perception, that it must true that there is no truth except that which we've created in our mind.&nbsp; It's not merely that this denies the existance of objective truth, but if you take that position seriously you find that it ought to be the case that there is no functional truth either.&nbsp; Yet there is a remarkable amount that we actually agree upon, starting with the fact that everyone seems to agree that these words we are writing to one another - however relative that they might be - still have sufficient functional truth to be useful to communicate.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 5081209, member: 4937"] At some point, you ought to admit to yourself that you are not as omniscient in understanding as you would like to believe and that there are many matters and perhaps every matter that will escape your full comprehension. Generally, the more you learn, the more quickly you hit upon this revelation whether the thing you are learning about is physics or theology. Yet, for every manner of learning, I think we can aspire to 'functional truths' - that is, we know first how little we can know, but we can still hope to know something sufficiently for it to be useful to us. Functional truths may be all that we can ever grasp, but in my opinion, the very existance of functional truths means that not everything is subjective and over some horizon we may never reach there is something objective. I think where the absolutist side tends to go astray is asserting that they have encompassed objective truth completely, and that they therefore may be a reliable fount of it. This is supremely arrogant, as it doesn't take much study of anything to realize that a lifetime isn't enough to understand anything fully. Conversely, I think where relativist side goes astray is making the claim that since all truth is percieved by insufficient minds and faculties of perception, that it must true that there is no truth except that which we've created in our mind. It's not merely that this denies the existance of objective truth, but if you take that position seriously you find that it ought to be the case that there is no functional truth either. Yet there is a remarkable amount that we actually agree upon, starting with the fact that everyone seems to agree that these words we are writing to one another - however relative that they might be - still have sufficient functional truth to be useful to communicate. [/QUOTE]

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