Relativism

For the past 2 days I had been engaging in a bit sort of a intellectual philosophical dialogue in persuasion in pointing out the human need for God to make sense out of life. It has been stimulating and I pray that in the midst of all the ramblings of the mind, God will open my spiritual eyes and the eyes of my friends to see His truth in the midst of the marketplace of ideas.

Many a times I faced with this statement, "What is correct for you is not correct for me. It is all relative. There is no clear definition of correctness." In combatting that, I gave 3 theses.

a) Every human being has a common moral conscience that leads them to desire goodness, perfection, beauty, justice and perhaps a utopian world. This shows that human beings are made in the image of God who is perfect, beautiful and just.

b) If there is no absolute truth, then all truth is worthless. There is no point learning about something to realise that it is not true at the end of it. Ravi Zacharias once said, modern education produces graduates who believe in nothing!

c) The natural law. There are some laws in the world that cannot be changed. Some people further suggested that there is natural moral law. Is the sky blue? Can human body fly? Where do small babies learn about the concept of justice and fairness they fight for toys?

d) Social Darwinism. Relativism gives rise to equality and allow people to do whatever that 'feels good' and 'feels right to them'. If I can believe it wrong for me to harm others, I can also believe it right — no matter what the circumstances.

Wikipedia proposes few more arguments, which I will need some more time to digest. The Catholic Church seems to provide quite a satisfying answer in debunking relativism. Wikipedia says that,

Relativism, orthodox Catholics say, constitutes a denial of the capacity of the human mind and reason to arrive at truth. Truth, according to Catholic theologians and philosophers (following Aristotle and Plato) consists of adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence of the mind and reality. Another way of putting it states that the mind has the same form as reality. This means when the form of the computer in front of me (the type, color, shape, capacity, etc.) is also the form that is in my mind, then what I know is true because my mind corresponds to objective reality.

Relativism, according to the Catholic and Aristotelian viewpoint, violates the philosophical principle of non-contradiction, a most fundamental principle of all thinking, and without which humans have no way to understand each other nor any possibility of science (emphasis mine)

The denial of an absolute reference denies God, who equates to Absolute Truth, according to these Christian philosophers. Thus, they say, relativism links to secularism, an obstruction of God in human life.

It is interesting to note that the pursuit of science is very much based on objectivity and gives no room for relativistic natural laws which govern our surroundings. Without objectivity in our worldview, I believe that we will never be able to make sense out of the bits of the world we live in as we will always be trying to reconcile different worldviews, which may not at the first place, at par with each other.

The pope also said something very interesting during the World Youth Day, warning against human agenda in absolutizing things that are relative, and relativising things that are absolute. He warns against absolutising relativistic human ideas, which leads to enslavement, and asserts that only the living God promises absoluteness of what is really good and true.

"In the last century we experienced revolutions with a common programme – expecting nothing more from God, they assumed total responsibility for the cause of the world in order to change it. And this, as we saw, meant that a human and partial point of view was always taken as an absolute guiding principle. Absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism. It does not liberate man, but takes away his dignity and enslaves him. It is not ideologies that save the world, but only a return to the living God, our Creator, the guarantor of our freedom, the guarantor of what is really good and true."