Here’s a pretty interesting read on philosophical relativism:
I’m confused in many ways. First, here’s the quote from Rorty:
“To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human language, and that human languages are human creations (Rorty, 5).”
Either I don’t understand something crucial here, or this is nuts. Without language there is no truth? So, before there were people, there was no reality? Gee, Christians are called hubristic for saying that God created us in His image. This guy is claiming that the universe is just a figment of our imagination!
Frankly, this kind of stuff is what’s wrong with academic philosophy. This is a guy literally arguing that the proverbial tree in the proverbial forest does not make the proverbial sound. Regular people don’t think stuff like that! You’ve got to talk yourself into believing it.
Second, is the Emergent Church movement really postmodernistically relative, or not? Here’s a quote from Smith:
“Even though each community will have its own nuances they will all have something in common. The Spirit will speak through the Biblical texts, and it will guide them to be a community of Christ (119).”
So, wait. We cannot have access to truth, so in some sense truth does not exist. We have only the coherent, self-consistent web of explanations of the universe. But somehow, each community’s (mutually inconsistent) web will be guided towards a common understanding? Wouldn’t that common understanding be, as normally referred to, the objective truth?
In science, we have a word for all this: theories. We see a phenomenon we don’t understand. We make theories, which are possible explanations. We collect more data, allowing us to discard theories that are inconsistent with the data. Eventually, when only one theory explains the data, we say we understand what is going on, and that we have the truth. The theories aren’t truth, they describe reality.
So, are all the postmodernists just renaming “theories” as “truths” and saying we can all have our own theory until we come across some data to prove it wrong?
I’m still confused.
