September 11, 2026
The Truth is Out There
Timothy Birdnow
Here is a good article at American Thinker about how the modern relativism in society, the idea of "my truth" and the fluidity of reality is making it impossible for anyone to get a truly fair trial.
FTA:
A summons arrived for jury duty in a county circuit court within a state among the first thirteen. The envelope contained a form to return. After the boxes for "Full Name” came three boxes to indicate Gender: Male or Female or Other.
What is truth? Welcome to the ascendancy of post-modernist philosophy and its thorough skepticism toward any possibility of objective truth. The philosophical revolutions that have led us to gender stipulated as only emotionally determined and having no constancy is being foisted on ordinary people by strenuous, dictatorial proselytizers who see objective truth as fluidly inconstant and only a reflection of each moment’s changing culture, evolving language, and power structures. They viciously cancel and harass any who dare dispute them despite their argument resting on the assumption of no truth.
You can have your truth now only if it comports with their truth.
Amen, amen I say unto you! How can anyone sit in judgment over any other person when Truth is relative to the person alone? You cannot say someone violated the law if the accused doesn't recognize the law and we have no right to "speak another's truth".
What I am about to say will be scandalous to the modernists; Truth is absolute, and immutable. What is lacking is merely our understanding of it. The relativism is in our knowledge or lack thereof which makes getting to the heart of the matter difficult. The truth is there, we just can't always see it because we are flawed and limited and because the guilty party (or sometimes the accuser) will lie and will hide the truth. But there isn't a personal truth that differs from what others find - that is a lie straight from Hell.
This is rather like saying the sun moved around the earth before Galileo and Copernicus because everyone believed it did. It didn't; it always was the reverse. Nothing changed with Copernicus or Galileo or even Kepler, there was no "new truth" only new scientific understanding of the truth that was always there.
What really hurt us, and has been internalized into our culture, is the misunderstanding of philosophers over the meaning of quantum indeterminacy. I would argue the same holds true for even many physicists, including Niels Bohr.
It was discovered thatsubatomic particles could only be measured for position OR energy state, not both. This is the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle, so named because Heisenberg found that you could know the energy state o a subatomic particle or it's position in space but not both. The reason was a measurement problem; measure one aspect and you change the other.
When it was discovered that particles are in different places at once and only appear as particles when the wavefront collapses that led Bohr and others to postulate the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum physics. There was the split-screen experiment when a single electron was fired at two slits with a detector behind each. I was found that the electron went through BOTH slits simultaneously.. At a conference in Copenhagen Bohr and some others postulated the idea that reality is actually a chain of events that happen simultaneously, which gives rise ultimately to two separate realities (and hence a new universe pops out of it, like another slice of cake at a birthday party). Thus the universe is endlessly dividing where both events occurred. Bohr did not postulate this just at the atomic level, but insisted it happened at the macro level as well aka where we are at.
And with the roll of the observer being so important to the collapse of the wavefront (why would looking at something have so dynamic an impact?) it meant reality was malleable and subject to change based on one's personal point of view.
This annoyed Edwin Schroedinger, who created his famous "cat in the box" thought experiment. Schroedinger wasn't trying to "explain" quantum indeterminacy so much as criticize it - he said if a cat was left in a box with a pill of poison that would break at a random time then the cat was both alive and dead until you opened the box - a complete absurdity. Schroedinger was in line with Einstein who famously stated "God does not play dice with the universe" over this. At any rate when asked to rebut Schroedinger, Bohr didn't dispute it but rather said "YEP!"
The Copenhagen Interpretation has dominated quantum physics ever since.
And, interestingly, at the same time the new neuroscience has biologists scrambling to find all the parts of the brain that control though and behavior. They have discovered quie a bit, and have been able to crudely reproduce some feelings with electrical stimulation of the brain. They also discovered something rather disturbing. Before you do something, say, take a drink of coffee, you have a rising brain wave called an action potential. Experiments have shown that rises BEFORE you are aware of any desire.
(What often remains forgotten is that there is a second brain wave that rises - a veto potential, as it were, that allows you to stop what you are about to do.)
At any rate neuroscientists are firmly convinced that free will is an illusion and that we are all slaves to our brains, which many of them argue are hard-wired and immutable.
Horsepoop sez I; we rewire our brains all the time, and sometimes consciously. Any great athlete knows that. There is a reason why you practice, and it's not just to strengthen your muscles but to acquire the skills which end up wired into your brain. You MAKE yourself a great athlete where before you were just good (or o.k.). And there was the work of Jeffrey Schwartz, a neurobiologist who worked with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder patients. He used Mindful Meditation from Yoga to help them rewire their brains to create a new neural pathway that bypassed the damaged one causing them their problems. It was hard but it worked. So, by an act of will you can remake your brain.
At any rate it's an odd dichotomy - that free will changes reality and yet there is no free will, only hard-wired gray matter entirely made so by environmental influences and thus we cannot understand another's "truth".
Two fundamental errors in thought and the philosophers have translated this into a new worldview that eschews reality altogether. In other words, we are our own gods.
Sounds a lot like an alien being from an old book I know who decided he wanted to be his own god and rebelled, and when he lost he came to Earth and tempted the only two people here with the same fundamental error.
So, to get bac to Law, American jurisprudence is based on the concept of Natural Law, that there is something in the Universe that is immutable and that compels us to a certain pattern of behavior. That law may not be written down but it is inherent in the fabric of reality and we have studied it, tried to understand it, and written it down to the best of our ability. Natural Law was the basis of the Ten Commandments and the other laws of the Bible (many of which are not wholly antiquated and we don't practice them for obvious reasons; we don't put a guy to death for mixing fabrics in a coat he sells you, for instance. But that law was important when textiles were very hard to make and precious and a lot of money was involved. Oh, and we could imprison someone for violating a consumer protection law, unlike in those days where the death penalty was the only real tool to be used.)
This relativism infects every part of society and the most dangerous aspect is in the Law,which is now becoming merely a suggestion box for jurists. People believe they can't know another person's "truth" and how can you condemn them for anything if you cannot say there is an actual right and wrong?
Nietzche forsaw all this and warned science would eventually fail because it would begin digging at it's own foundational beliefs, that the Universe is essentially knowable, that reason explains what we see, that truth is an absolute. He was right, and his rejection of those things led him into utter madness (that and neuro-syphilis).
At any rate someone needs to stand up for the concrete nature of truth, at least on the macro level. It may be that quantum reality is different (or more likely we just don't understand it) but the unverse works on averages and the average over the vast scale that is the human being those averages make for an immutable reality. I am mindful of the Tornado ina Junk Yard often used in the Evolution argument; Fred Hoyle argued that you won't get a nice new car if a tornado hit a junk yard. The parts are all there but it won't be assembled (and Hoyle was an atheist). The same holds true for Natural Law as opposed to this relativistic crap. We can confidently say there is a right and wrong even if there is some malleability at the quantum level. It's like a single bacterium that is unable to reporoduce; in large numbers it will kill you but one that cannot reproduce by mitosis will pass out of you harmlessly or get killed by an antibody.
So yes, there is a concrete reality we can deal with. And yes, we have a right and a duty to impose "our truth" on people who do bad things. The truth is out there.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:19 AM
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