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If there is a white ball, and one person is wearing pink lenses, they will see it as pink. The person with the blue lenses will think it is blue.

It remains white, the Absolute Truth. The different coloured lens represent individual POV.
 
blackbelt1961 said:
Your describing relative truth that's not what I asked you
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Yes, I believe there is an absolute truth. But I don't believe human beings have the capacity to ever comprehend it fully. To us, this absolute is always a relative truth, relative to our awareness, i.e. the level of evolutionary consciousness we happen to be on. We tend, as a species, to agree with those who have the same point of view as us and discard those who both see less of that that absolute and (more importantly) those who see more of that truth.

People who read "just" the Bible and discard everything else as 'false truth' are deluding themselves into the thinking they have have the only keys to the absolute truth.
 
Jae said:
The ball is there - but it isn't white.
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Precisely. It is white because it reflects all colours of light. With no light to reflect, it is black like everything else in the dark room. The whole discussion is also assuming visible light. If you view it in the IR or UV ends of the spectrum, it may well be different.

The absolute truth is that there is a spherical object that absorbs/reflects light of certain frequencies. That is a testable characteristic. It may have other testable characteristics as well, such as diameter, hardness, bounciness, etc. How we perceive that on our end can vary.

Neo said:
"Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white.
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion?"
- Late Lament, by The Moody Blues
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Graeme Edge is not a great poet by any means, but that verse is certainly one of his best.
 
Graeme Edge touches on the very point we're talking about here. The cold hearted orb, of course, is the Moon, and in the moonlight we can't make out the colours like we can in the sunlight. If we looked at a red ball and a yellow ball in the moonlight, they would appear respectively grey and white. But those balls are still red and yellow in reality. It's our point of view in the moonlight that changes what they look like.
 
To carry this back to the subject of God and related:

With the ball, we can make testable, replicable statements about the ball, even if colour is not one of them (e.g. as I stated, we can test what frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum it reflects or absorbs instead of simply looking at the colour).

How do we make testable, replicable statements about God when all we have as evidence is human perceptions? We don't have the ability to make testable statements because we can't put God under a microscope or shine lights of specific frequencies on God or do other, similar tests. All we can do is read the various accounts that people have given of their experience of something they call God.

But those experiences are like our attempts to state the colour of the ball; they are affected by the perceptions of those having the experience and the reader's experience and perceptions will then colour how they interpret the writer's experience as well. If there is an absolute truth at the core of all those experiences, we have no way of knowing with certainty what it is because everything we know about it is filtered through the lenses of various observers.

And, really, to even say that there is an "absolute truth" at the core of those experiences is an act of faith. For all we know, this is all dealing with human psychology and neurology and the "truth" is about how we perceive and experience things, not about an eternal creator/redeemer of all that is. We can say we "know" it, but it is not the kind of testable, replicable knowledge we have in testing the physical characteristics of the ball. It is subjective knowledge, an understanding of our own perceptions and feelings about something rather than objective understanding of something that we can reliably and replicably test (like the existence and characteristics of the ball).

One can believe and hold this to be true or not believe and hold this to be true; it is a statement about how we know the truth of metaphysical propositions, not about the actual truth of them.

Which brings us back around to me being an agnostic. This is really the agnostic position again. We cannot be certain in a scientific sense about metaphysical propositions like the existence of God or an afterlife, only have a subjective personal belief as to whether they do or do not exist.
 
BetteTheRed said:
If there is a white ball, and one person is wearing pink lenses, they will see it as pink. The person with the blue lenses will think it is blue.

It remains white, the Absolute Truth. The different coloured lens represent individual POV.
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you Just proved my point

one seeing the balls color in its true light

and the pink and blue seeing it in its false or in this case , partial light

which is what we do to His word do we not?
 
BetteTheRed said:
But whether you can see it or not, the white ball is still there.
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because the White ball is Absolute independent of the seer , but of the seer seeing it as pink or blue

is that a false/distorted view of the white?

in a classroom the teacher would Give poor ol'e Johnny an "F" if he said blue
 
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blackbelt1961 said:
so now that we agree that absolute truth exists, what would you call the opposite ?
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A relative truth.

If one believes the world is flat then that is their relative truth based on observation. If you were to say that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west then that is an observational truth from your point of view. A greater observational truth would see the Earth spinning on its axis, making it appear that the Sun "rises" and "sets".
 
blackbelt1961 said:
But is it true ?
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Relatively for that person, yes. Absolutely, no.

Because of our physical nature, being subject to our various physical bodies, the emotional and mental constructs we've developed in our lives, I don't believe we'll ever have the capacity to physically say "this" is truth or "that" is an absolute truth. Once we say this or that is a truth then it changes, or maybe more accurately our view of it changes. We will do "greater things" as we evolve in time, but until we learn how to reflect those greater truths within us, our relatives truths will always falls short of what really is. Even the greater things we do in time will still only be relative truths compared to the absolute.

The physical Universe is an illusion, subject to a constant barrage of changes, it can never be relied on. As long as we view the Universe from a strictly physical point of view, it will deceive us and we will suffer. This last sentence was one of the Buddha's main points in His first of the Four Noble Truths, when He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'the mundane world will always be incapable of satisfying the disciple'. I believe the Christ echoed this same sentiment when He said: "You, are from below, I am from above: you are of this present world, I am not of this present world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins".
 
Neo said:
Relatively for that person, yes. Absolutely, no.

Because of our physical nature, being subject to our various physical bodies, the emotional and mental constructs we've developed in our lives, I don't believe we'll ever have the capacity to physically say "this" is truth or "that" is an absolute truth. Once we say this or that is a truth then it changes, or maybe more accurately our view of it changes. We will do "greater things" as we evolve in time, but until we learn how to reflect those greater truths within us, our relatives truths will always falls short of what really is. Even the greater things we do in time will still only be relative truths compared to the absolute.

The physical Universe is an illusion, subject to a constant barrage of changes, it can never be relied on. As long as we view the Universe from a strictly physical point of view, it will deceive us and we will suffer. This last sentence was one of the Buddha's main points in His first of the Four Noble Truths, when He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'the mundane world will always be incapable of satisfying the disciple'. I believe the Christ echoed this same sentiment when He said: "You, are from below, I am from above: you are of this present world, I am not of this present world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins".
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A stir of a caldron of life? Thus it comes round ... or goes round depending on perspective of POV ... anachronism?
 
Mendalla said:
Precisely. It is white because it reflects all colours of light. With no light to reflect, it is black like everything else in the dark room. The whole discussion is also assuming visible light. If you view it in the IR or UV ends of the spectrum, it may well be different.

The absolute truth is that there is a spherical object that absorbs/reflects light of certain frequencies. That is a testable characteristic. It may have other testable characteristics as well, such as diameter, hardness, bounciness, etc. How we perceive that on our end can vary.



Graeme Edge is not a great poet by any means, but that verse is certainly one of his best.
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"Like" this post because of your talk about the spherical object. I don't know Graeme Edge's work.
 
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