No Absolute Truth? Look Again!

JACOB ROBERT MOON, JR.

A philosophy professor was talking to his students: "There is, of course, no such thing as an absolute truth. If there were, we couldn't recognize it if we ran across it, and there would be no way we could apply an absolute truth to the tangle of utterly relative values that make up the human experience."

The professor made these statements, he pointed out, in the interest of intellectual freedom. But they also had moral and ethical ramifications, because if there is no absolute truth, then where do we find a reliable standard for human behavior? Right and wrong become a matter of individual preference or of social or tribal tradition, not of truth or error.

As it happened, one of the students in the philosophy class had attended the Christian Science Sunday School. You wouldn't expect him to accept in any degree this relativist point of view. But he did.

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