Leaving Truth

By Keith Sewell

"Leaving Truth" offers a radically new, and potentially conclusive, contribution to our ancient science vs. religion debate. It is a collection of five essays, one main and four subsidiary. The collection addresses how we can most coherently select proposals as knowledge, and the limitation from this on the kinds of proposals that we can select. Though at first glance abstruse and academic, addressing this most basic epistemic question seems to yield a very surprising result: That we have been maintaining our concept "truth" either redundantly or as an independent and reason-antithetical basis for knowledge; and that the proposals of all of our authoritarian systems of emotionally seductive irrationality -- in particular, but not limited to, our theistic religions -- can only be maintained from this basis. "Leaving Truth" suggests that our past 250 years of progress in epistemology can be summarized through the injunction that we should stop asking of any knowledge proposal, "Is this 'true'?" and start asking instead, "Can I honestly qualify this as knowledge?" It then shows how and why our theists cannot do this for their proposals. Its logical core demonstrates that both of the modern epistemological developments that are broadly assumed by theists and atheists alike to support the theists' position (David Hume's dismissal of Induction as our basis for "objective proof", and Karl Popper's demonstration that science can provide only "best present" knowledge, as opposed to certainty) achieve instead the opposite. That they undercut the theists' position at a level from which no coherent defense can be made. Leaving Truth thereby offers atheists and free-thinkers a prospect for the kind clear victory at the intellectual and academic level that we have not dared to hope for since collapse of the Radical Enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Feb 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781456607586

Book preview

review.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the proponents of ‘The Radical Enlightenment’; the philosophical movement that is generally supposed to have had its fair trial and to have crashed and burned in the deadly farce of Robespierre’s Paris. I believe this supposition to be a propaganda fabrication of its enemies. I think that by the 1780s the Enlightenment in France had been sabotaged from within, through incorporation of much of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s seductive irrationality, and so never had an honest trial. One of this book’s deeper aims is to reopen its case.

To quote from Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment:

Baron d’Holbach’s salon and its principal protagonists did foment revolutionary ideas, but it was more than a mere political revolution they were thinking about; they did write and publish subversive books, but they wanted to bring down something infinitely more vast than the monarchy or even the Catholic Church. The vision they discussed around the baron’s dinner table was one in which women and men would no longer be oppressed by the fear and ignorance instilled by religion but could instead live their lives to the full. Instead of sacrificing their desires to the vain hope of reward in the afterlife, they would be able to walk freely, to understand their place in the universe as intelligent machines of flesh and blood and pour their energies into building individual lives and communities based on their inheritance of desire, empathy, and reason. Desire, erotic and otherwise, would make their world beautiful and rich; empathy would make it kind and livable; reason would allow an understanding of the world’s immutable laws.

I agree with the baron on the changes that we would see in the world, and on understanding that their achievement will require our ‘bringing down something infinitely more vast’. This book is my attempt to put my finger on that ‘something’.

Table of Contents 

Preface

A Chemical Analogy

Leaving Truth

1. Base level anthropocentrism:

2. Consequent impossibility of qualitatively superior knowledge:

3. Consequent resolvability of logically exclusive pairs of proposals:

4. Consequent irrationality of truth:

5. Revelation’s inadequacy as a truth defense:

6. Source and nature of reason:

7. Karl Popper’s answer to David Hume:

8. Implications of Popper’s answer:

Urgency of Application

Practical Implications

Crystal Blue Persuasion

The Cuddly Kitten

Spirituality sans Theism

Glossary

Preface

This collection of essays started from an epistemological question, about the legitimacy and utility of our truth concept. That might sound bad enough, but the inquiry then went deeper. It ended up at the apparent discrepancy between the kinds of lives that most of our species and throughout most of its recorded history have been living, and those that we say we would rather have been living. To clarify; we seem to have been requesting pretty much Epicurus’ prescription: A dry roof over our heads, some comfortable and esthetically pleasing furniture and similar possessions, a sufficiency of tasty and satisfying food, stability and safety for raising our children, and a good balance between meaningful and intellectually satisfying work and enough other quality time for loving and laughing with our mates, children and friends.

The deep question arises from these things having always been so clearly possible—for members of a cooperative species that has been, in adaptive terms, by so far the biggest and baddest son of a bitch in the valley—and yet our having so substantially failed to achieve them. Life for most of us, and most of the time, has observably contained very few of the Epicurean elements; but instead plenty of grinding poverty, through gross political and economic exploitation; and premature death, through war, famine, pogroms and pestilence. Our strange discrepancy lies in inability to identify anyone but the majority of ourselves as having been preventing the majority of ourselves from living as we have wished. Nor can we, in intellectual honesty, blame it on our leaders; as they have ultimately been so only through our consent and participation. For a self avowedly rational species I think that it has all been, at the least, embarrassing.

We seem so far to have come up with only two explanations for the discrepancy, neither of which has been helpful in resolving it:

1. Invention of an external agency: a malignant supernatural being who is able to influence us, and who—for some reason which has never been very well explained—takes pleasure in our suffering (the Devil or Satan proposal).

2. Admission of our own agency, but with the firm caveat that—due to some intrinsic internal flaw(s)— we just can’t help it (the human condition proposal).

I will be trying in these essays to introduce a third proposal. I believe it to be actionable, and thereby hopeful in a sense that the first two are not; but also, and unfortunately, to be far more difficult to grasp. Trivially, if it were something obvious and intuitive then figuring it out probably wouldn’t have taken so long. More pragmatically, I think that our minds have undergone some powerful changes during approximately the past 300 years, through which and in terms of which they may at last be receptive. I understand these changes to have been part of the general empowerment of reason and science that we now lump under the heading of The European Enlightenment. As such, I have had to pitch my essays pretty narrowly to that movement’s present heirs—in essence, to our atheist and free-thought community. I would dearly love to be able to cast a wider net, but my confidence extends at best to my ability to communicate this idea to my closest intellectual brothers and sisters; to people who were already 99% of the way towards figuring it out for themselves. If I can succeed in that then, together, we will be able to enlarge our net.

This collection is structured—or perhaps more honestly, it structured itself—as a main essay and four subsidiaries. I wrote the main essay (originally called Truth? but now, and a little less cryptically, Leaving Truth) to communicate the most important thing that I want to say. I then posted it and argued for it over a period of several years in all of our main on-line secular humanist and free-thought forums. To the extent that it is at last clear and understandable it owes this to the constructive feedback of far more of my brothers and sisters than I can possibly name. Most did not understand it, but revisions to address their misunderstandings gradually strengthened the document, and the shorter subsidiary essays also grew out of that dialog. Essentially, they address significant areas of objection to Leaving Truth’s thesis which I was not skillful enough to be able to field from within it without an unacceptable loss of focus. The subsidiary essays can therefore be read as stand-alones, but will work better as adjuncts to Leaving Truth, or as gear-change/fresh-perspectives if the reader gets bogged down; Leaving Truth being still, and after all my best efforts, not a walk in the park.

I must offer particular thanks to my wife, Janet, for her practical suggestions on creation and promotion of the book; to my friend Gary Scheidegger (the first other mind to really solidly grasp Truth? and then Leaving Truth’s main point), and to my editor Elaine Partnow. To the extent that this collection’s hurdles are now negotiable it is most especially thanks to their efforts.

I must also insert here some pre-clarification on my use of notes. I have designated notes that I consider immediately pertinent to the flow of the text by superscript letters, and inserted them as footnotes. The slightly less urgent items are designated by superscript Roman numerals, and grouped as traditional book endnotes.

A Chemical Analogy

This essay was the last written, and was so positioned in the book’s early drafts. But I’ve yielded here to the advice of several trustworthy friends in moving it into the