Absolute truths surround you every day, as do relative truths, and some truths are both absolute and relative. Sue is my wife. This is an absolute truth to both you and me. You may be married to someone named Sue, but it is not the same person, so the truth of that statement is also relative to me.
You know absolute truths when you see them every day, or at least you usually do. You have faith in the true statement that your chair will hold you up, you don't test this every time you sit in it, you practice faith in understanding that truth, and you simply sit down.
Our rational mind demands truth. I have told many groups that the very first thing that you need to know when you hear something is: Is it true? If it is not true, you shouldn't believe it. There is a difference between open mindedness and empty headedness.
So, how do we know truth?
It turns out to be easy, but different from what we are often told. In today's society we mistakenly think truth comes from science. Science for the most part uses inductive reasoning from which you can only derive a probability of truth, nothing is absolute. Science produces data not truth. One negative test and a hypothesis is disproved. Only in deductive reasoning can you develop absolute truths, that is, truths that must be correct, truths that are necessarily correct.
Let me make an alarming statement to illustrate this, and it is a statement you really know the answer to deductively, and it is meant to be shocking.
Is it OK to torture babies for fun?
Almost every person will have an immediate repulsion to that notion and immediately know the correct and absolute answer: No, it isn't OK. I would broaden that to include all humans. If you think it is OK then you need very serious help or imprisonment.
You immediately deduce the correct answer to that question, and you know it deductively, not from scientific experimentation. In fact, we strongly rejected, to the point of executing the Nazi scientists who did experiments like this as immoral, and they are.
You will usually find that the person advocating the idea that truth is unknowable is trying irrationally to escape from reason and avoiding having to face truth.
Aristotle understood this when he said:
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.
You can actually ask the question by eliminating the word truth and ask, what is? Describing that is a very easy way to determine what truth is.
Yes, I understand and have read many irrational philosophic ideas about what truth is I simply reject them as irrational.
For self-improvement, first and foremost, face truth for what it is, facts about reality.
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