This extra comment is a nice follow up to your other one, because I was going to ask whether you acknowledged the relativism of your answer. And, it sounds like you are by recognizing that it’s “assessed individually.”
Lately, I’ve begun to see that epistemology, itself, is entirely relative, too. Or, at least, entirely subjective, which is basically the same thing, no? So, if all religious understanding (whether about god or gods, Confucianism or Taoism) is only *relatively* true, then they might as well be false. We’re looking for something that True, always and everywhere.
Since we were on the topic of evolution, I should point out that I wouldn’t say that “science” is True, here either. Far from it, in fact! Science is constantly being tested, updated, challenged, and questioned (as it should be). Science may tell us “how” but it cannot tell us “why.” Adherence to any religion that purports to have an answer to how and why by pointing to an imaginary entity possessed of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, should be only lightly held, if at all.
Again, I don’t want to poke at what you hold sacred. Your beliefs are yours, to whatever extent your conditioning creates them.
Replies (2)
I agree with you on a lot of stuff, including how claims of truth are relative to a framework and the truths they describe may even be subjective, and that the appropriate epistemology may even be subjective.
I think that you are, however, confusing a consensus on the subjective claims of truth, or on the means of claiming truth, with objective truth, when you say
> So, if all religious understanding (whether about god or gods, Confucianism or Taoism) is only *relatively* true, then they might as well be false. We’re looking for something that True, always and everywhere.
Something that is true everywhere and always is still perfectly achievable in a subjective framework, if your framework applies soundly to the whole universe. The fact that there is not consensus on this is not reliably indicative of it being false anywhere, ever. This applies whether they outright deny your framework and understanding or they merely do not understand it or don't know of it at all. The framework can still be concordant with reality under any of these conditions.
For two ostensibly contradictory interpretations of reality to both be the truth, it is often a difference in frameworks between minds that makes it appear that way, when in reality there is no such contradiction, and so a consensus on truth can exist properly understood, while appearing to have very different and incompatible claims if you interpret them through a framework in which the claims lose their meaning. I think that is one of the things that people do when they confuse consensus with truth, or get stuck on the words or definitions of concepts and forget the relativeness of the meaning, which it looks like you are trying to not do, but are still doing.
This is not even to cover the different kinds of truth or to specify any of my preferred epistemological frameworks, just sort of a meta thing. Piaget invented a field called genetic epistemology to cover a lot of this meta stuff and explain how truths can be concordant with reality in the way I've described. I only just learned of him, so I'll be looking more into that soon.
I consider myself a kind of rationalist, realist, with I would say a strong conceptualization of the relativeness of meaning to frameworks and to the objective reality to be beheld. A lot of my philosophy is concordant with Objectivism, but I don't believe in their dogmatic claim that there is no god just because they don't understand what God is and can't measure him, and so they further define God as outside of all of existence. That's the empiricist's fallacy plus victory by definition.
Despite my strong rationalist a priori bend, in fact reinforcing it, I have also a predilection to the critical inspection that is the essence of Critical Rationalism, and a fondness for his form of empirical falsification that forms the backbone of most modern scientific inquiry (well, the good science that is done that's not completely ruined by fiat and superstitious dogmatic nonsense)
I do hope this is an engaging conversation for you and doesn't come off as gloating or anything. This is just me.