Objectivity

Just what is it? Besides having the quality of being objective, or having to do with external or material reality (as you can see in the handy dandy little box on our about page) just what is meant by objectivity? The American Heritage Dictionary defines 'objective' with these additions;

Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: an objective critic
Based on observable phenomena; presented factually: an objective appraisal.

Usually when we say a thing or person is objective, or has objectivity we mean it has the ring of Truth. That is to say the thing is true or the person speaking is stating something truthful. But here's the rub... how do we know what truth is?? In fact, how can we know anything with certainty to begin with? (Actually agnostics believe that we can't, but that's an essay for another day) This ranks right up there with the pursuit of answering the big questions mankind has attempted to answer almost since the beginning of time. Questions like, "What is the meaning of life?" Or "What is my purpose in the universe?" Of course then there is the biggest of the big questions that sooner or later pretty much every thinking person asks in one form or another... "Does God exist?" To answer any of these questions, we'd better have a pretty good idea of what truth is, and what it isn't. This is where OBJECTIVITY comes in. In order to determine what truth is, we'd have to be as sure as we can be that the things upon which our definition was based were uninfluenced by our own bias, prejudice, or subjective view of our physical surroundings. But how do we do that? No matter how hard we try, WE are always the ones doing the thinking, and maybe our perception of our material surroundings (the universe in which we seem to be ensconced) is not accurate, and being so it would then naturally throw any conclusion we reached into uncertainty, as the assumptions upon which we built our view were ultimately unreliable! (Another agnostic idea) Whew! Is there any way out of this dilemma?

Well, we here at Objectivitees believe there is a way out, and if we haven't bored you to death already, then take a journey with us and we'll try to show you what we learned (Or more truthfully was revealed to us) when we asked ourselves "The big questions".

First of all, when we began to attempt to formulate answers to our queries, we often found ourselves discussing our tentative postulates with like-minded (Mindless?) individuals, who (just as we were doing to them) inevitably cast doubt upon our fledgling theories breaking our little hearts! (And big egos) It always seemed as though others could find the flaws in our attempts at logic, just as we were punching holes in their idiocy. (Did I say idiocy out loud?) In due course, this would find us in the company of someone who would say something to the effect of 'There is no real truth... or 'There are no absolutes'. In fact we heard this mantra sooooo many times that one-day, it dawned on us that we were accepting it as truth without critically examining the claim itself! Then it occurred to us (again it was more like a revelation) that if these things were true, they would have to be "true" in the first case, and "absolute" in the second, and that made the statements Self Contradictory! Further, we quickly realized, this would then make the opposite intended meaning of the statements ABSOLUTELY TRUE. I mean wow. Can you say epiphany? We had found something that was absolutely true. There is truth, and there are absolutes. (DT0001-SB anyone??) This, quite naturally, led us to something else entirely. Truth is absolute. It does not contradict itself. In fact, it can't. An idea cannot be 'true' and 'not true'. In short order we had learned the second thing about truth. What a day! We took the "true/not true" thingy we had deduced from the premises that there absolutes, and there is truth, and we named it...are you ready?

The Principle of non-contradiction. It occurred (was revealed?) to us that perhaps we could use this 'principle' to determine objectively whether or not some other nearby things we observed from time to time in this thing we called a universe were true. We understood by implication that ideas, which were making what we called a "truth claim", would not be true if they were internally self-contradictory. We were really excited to think there was hope that our little idea could help us slash our way through to all the answers to the big questions by giving us the means to figure out what was true and what was not. (It was only later that we sadly realized we were not the first ones to have come up with the 'principle', and had only stumbled upon what we would come to find was known as one of the "first principles of logic")

Unfortunately, as we applied our newfound tool, we quickly noticed that it did not help us to directly determine what was true. It only helped us eliminate what was not true from contention. It did this by clearly indicating that any truth claim that was internally inconsistent, or self-contradictory could not possible be true as our new understanding of the absolute nature of truth would demand. Still, that was not bad, and we were not completely devoid of happiness as we took some comfort from the understanding that we had deduced the principle on our own, and did not have to pay some fancy university many thousands of our parents dollars to have someone spoon feed us the knowledge. Also we got to show everyone how smart we were by pointing out the contradictions in their assumptions, compared to their stated conclusions. (There's that 'ego' thingy again) We quickly became about as popular as the early Greek philosophers known as the cynics. (They used to go around pointing out how people are wrong too, but that's another day's story. For now we'll just mention briefly that we eventually learned to distinguish between the truth and a "socially improper" method of proclaiming it to people whose respect we wished to retain.)

Anyway back to how to eliminate false claims. It works kind of like this. If two competing claims that an idea is true are opposed to one another, one can be true while the other false, or the other can be true while the one is false, or they must both be false. Notice how the principle "tool" did not point directly to truth? After thinking a while, we realized we would have to examine the underlying assumptions (or presuppositions) of each claim to determine on its own merit whether or not it was true. At first, this seemed a monumental task. If we wanted say... to figure out which religion was true, or what is the exact nature of the universe, we would have to study all the claims of all of the various religions, or all the myriad positions on the nature of the universe, until we found one that was internally consistent. Even if we did take all the time that would require, we still would not know whether it was true, we would only know it was consistent with itself. Let's assume we did find one. After determining it's consistency, we would then have to compare it with other things we knew to be true, to see if it opposed them. Are you following us on this point? If we know one thing is true, and truth is absolute and extant, no other truth can conflict with it, even if they are truths from different disciplines of study. Then when we had a number of things we knew to be true, by reason of them not conflicting with each other, we would have a much more solid view of reality, or in other words, we would achieve OBJECTIVITY.

The problem is however, what is the first truth we can determine (aside from our established fact that truth exists and is absolute) about our circumstances in the universe upon which to base all our later comparisons of truth claims, so that we could reason with relative certainty what is true and what is not, without having to base all our knowledge on assumptions. Let alone the problem of finding two ideas that were internally consistent on their own, yet still opposed to one another. You see, if all our ideas about what is true were based ultimately on an un-provable assumption, we still have no objectivity.

So we needed a way to eliminate extraneous propositions when comparing truth claims. This meant reducing each question to a set of two possibilities. Right or wrong. Yes or no. Is or isn't. If there are multiple choices one can never be certain. (Or at least we'd run out of time to examine all the possibilities) However, when there are only two choices and one is false, the other must be true. Now we had a means of using our little principle to really help us. It was only in the context of numerous possibilities that our 'tool' would only be useful for eliminating false things, potentially leaving us with several possibly true things, and alas, no objectivity. This meant instead of asking what is the universe like... we had to ask "simpler" questions that could be answered with a yes or no kind of answer. Then if we found one or the other was internally inconsistent, and the other inconsistent, we'd know by the process of elimination that the other answer must be true.

We decided to start with a nice easy question such as, "Does the universe exist?" See how that eliminates middle ground? The only possible answers were 'It does exist', or 'It does not exist'. Now in due course, we came up with an answer to the question, but it is not relevant to the point we wish to make clear to you here at Objectivitees. What is relevant is the next thing we learned about truth by following this 'simplification' process. Let's just answer the question both ways, and then for the time being, assume each answer arrived at is correct. (Meaning it has a correspondence to reality) We noticed if we answered the question of the existence of the universe in the affirmative, the fact of its existence stood apart from the reality of the universe itself. We very surprisingly also noticed that if we answered in the negative (and assumed it was correct) the fact it did not exist was also independent of the universes ultimate nature. In other words, truth existed independent of the specific nature of the universe. In other words, the truth about the universe would be true whether or not the universe existed. It would not matter what we thought was true; the truth would still be whatever it was. Wow. Now we knew three things about truth.

Truth exists.
Truth is absolute.
Truth is independent from the natural world, or Transcendent. (It is not dependent upon us to recognize it for it to exist)

We also noticed that the truth existed either way. It was there whether the universe existed, or the universe did not exist. The truth existed even when nothing else did. Double wow. Yep. Four things. We knew from our basic science courses that all things require a cause, which pretty much covers the universe and everything in it, but since truth was neither in the universe as an object, or part of it, it was rather an all encompassing concept describing the nature of physical reality, we noticed that truth had to be uncreated. In other words, the universe is a physical thing so it needs a cause, but truth exists whether or not the universe does, it is not a physical thing so it does not require a cause. Can you say triple wow? We can. We did. Four things.

Truth is self-extant, or uncaused.

Because it was self-extant and uncreated, it also had to always exist. (things seem to be getting easier here, don't they?) Five things.

Truth is eternal.

Every time we learned a new truth about truth, the next one came with less effort in the thought process. In fact, as we pondered in awe the incredible implications of these truths about truth, and busily applied our "truth knowledge" to other questions, we noticed our discoveries about truth were actually quite obvious. In fact, we never noticed them before because we essentially had 'tried' to not notice. When we really thought about it we figured how 'couldn't' truth be anything other than Extant, Absolute, Transcendent, Uncaused, and Eternal? Well, we never answered that question, despite thinking about it for a couple years until finally we realized, uh-huh, number six;

Truth is self-evident.

So, as a corollary to truth being self-evident we find that in order to avoid truth, we have to actively work to not see it, run away from it or, deny it. So naturally we noticed that in order to run away from something, intentionally not see it, or deny it, "it" (truth) would have to be pursuing us. Hmmm, pursuing us. While we actively attempt to avoid it. Interesting. If it is pursuing us it had to be that;

Truth is alive.

Of course if truth is alive, and pursuing us, it follows that it has volition, or will. Only intelligent beings have a will. Therefore;

Truth is a personal being.

Ok, now those last two were kind of freaky. (See now what I meant at the beginning of this essay by truth having been "revealed" to us?) We are talking about a concept here that goes well beyond what we expected to find, In fact, we weren't even trying to find it. We were trying to find objectivity, remember? Objectivity. We were trying to find the answers to all those "big questions". Yet this just jumped out at us screaming and yelling, "Here I AM!" We were (and still are) stunned.

After coming to grips with this, it seemed we had heard this stuff before. But we had not heard it about truth; we had heard this about God. Could God and Truth be the same thing?

God. Could it be? Did God exist? And there it was, another "simplified" question. There were only two possible answers to the question. God exists, or God does not exist. Well, there was no avoiding it now. We had to answer the question. (After all, it had pursued us this far, how could we continue to try to avoid, deny and run away from it?)

First, (rather illogically, considering what had recently been revealed to us) we tried to examine all the religions to find out if there were any "God concepts" that were internally consistent. How na�ve were we? We found out that our original problem from before we knew what truth was, was right there in front of us namely, way too many propositions. We found that in the world today there were basically a seemingly infinite number of competing religions. There was Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and it's little brother Buddhism. If those weren't enough, there were a myriad of smaller religions, cults and secular philosophies. To top it all off, there were at least three major varieties of Judaism, four or five major divisions of Islam, Hinduism has literally millions of 'gods', and Buddhism, though not literally believing in a 'god' so to speak, had itself an uncountable number of philosophical practices and all of these claimed TRUTH. Then there was Christianity. At last count, there were at least 34,000 different 'denominations'. Just to put icing on the cake, each of the major religions also has numerable sociological and theological cults, which deviate from the fundamental doctrines of their parent faith.

Aaarrggh. As daunting as it was, the mountain had to be climbed. We repeat, aaarrggh. As old as we were and being removed by at least one decade from our military physical fitness peak, we would have to climb.

We can spare you the details about how long we had forgotten about the recently discovered 'principle of non-contradiction tool' so formerly well applied, and get straight to the point. After studying for many years, we began to notice a pattern. This pattern was allowing us to group all the belief systems we were checking out into relatively few categories. We did not have names for the categories, but still, this began to organize our task and sometimes even had the fortuitous effect of organizing a few thoughts too. Then we happened upon a college textbook (coincidence or pursuit??) that dealt with what the author called "Worldviews". In fact, the author had coined the expression in the early 1970's, and though not singularly responsible, was a leader in the discipline of studying and categorizing belief systems, and gave the word (worldview) the meaning we use here today, which is;

A series of propositions concerning the fundamental assumed facts about the universe employed by an individual through which one filters new information to arrive at a conclusive statement concerning the nature of reality. (Paraphrased)

This book distilled all belief systems into five basic groups or worldviews, which then allowed us to quickly note only the fundamental beliefs of a particular system, and then use those beliefs to categorize the particular faith, which had the virtue of allowing us to only deal with the category group to which a Faith or belief system belonged, and based upon whether or not the category (read Worldview) itself had internal consistency or inconsistency, quickly discern the relative merit of the belief with respect to whether or not it was TRUE. Whew! What a mouthful. But it is a useful mouthful. All worldviews will fit in one of the categories. We don't have enough time to give you a specific definition of each, but they're fairly straightforward and if you have read this far and understood much of what we are sharing with you, you will have no problem getting the idea of what their basic meanings are. If not, there's always that handy dandy invention called a dictionary. We will however, abbreviate a definition for each, to follow the label.

The five Worldview groups are as follows;

Monotheism (Believes there is only one God)
Atheism (Believes there is no God { Or Philosophical Naturalism)
Polytheism (Believes there are many Gods)
Pantheism (Believes that God is the entirety of nature {Or Panentheism})
Animism (Believes that God is expressed in objects, and all things alive or not have a living soul)

Now, I won't bore you with why, but trust us to just share with you for brevity's sake, that Worldviews 2 through 4, by definition contain internal inconsistencies, rendering any faith, belief system, religion, or the like, placed within the category, by device of the principle of non-contradiction, to be False. This left only those beliefs that could fit into category 1 as possible candidates for truth. That made our job just a teeny tiny little, almost immeasurable bit, easier. (please note sarcastic tones contained in the writer's intent, which does not translate well to paper, but makes the statement mean the opposite of a "teeny tiny little, almost immeasurable bit, ...")

Now we had a chance of obtaining objectivity if we could eliminate the monotheistic beliefs that contained self-contradicting belief statements. And this is just exactly what we did.

Getting back to our revelation concerning the nature of truth, and how we had thought we had heard the concepts expressed somewhere before, we compared the truth stuff to the precepts of the monotheistic religions and guess what we found?

Every single aspect or description of truth was also an attribute or statement about the nature of God as expressed in the Judeo-Christian faith. In fact, Jesus Christ said, "I AM the way the Truth, and the Life..." and by doing so claimed to be both Truth, and God.

So what we had (and still have) here, is a one to one correspondence of the nature of Truth revealed to us by reason, to the nature of God as revealed to us in the Bible of the Christians and Jews, meaning only one thing.

God is Truth, and Truth is God.

I know, I know, you are now asking "but what if the Bible (or Christian and Jewish faiths) has internal inconsistencies? (At least those of you who stayed awake long enough to read this whole thing are asking that) Well, that's simple. And it is a very fair question. It deserves an answer. A true answer. Ask yourself a simple question, "is the Bible True?" You will find there are only two possibilities. 'It is', or 'It is not'. Then find out which answer is the internally consistent one. Yes, or no. But be careful, it will change your life. (You might even end up writing essays like this one, even when you can't type!)

We answered it, we did not find any self-contradictions, and we have been looking for many years now.

We have achieved OBJECTIVITY, won't you?

God is Truth is Jesus. Amen.

Truth bless you,
The staff at Objectivitees.com (Both of us)