“You Can’t Handle the Truth!”
By Michael Giere, The Bull Elephant.
[The] security of straight lines and absolute time in the public mind was slowly replaced with the unease that there were no absolutes at all.
(Title from “A Few Good Men” 1992)
The prolific English author and historian, the late Paul Johnson, began his seminal history, Modern Times, this way:
Mr. Johnson explained that the two-century-old Newtonian law of physics, based on straight lines and absolute time, was challenged by the anomalies of the deviating motions of planets discovered by powerful new telescopes. Then, in 1905, a twenty-six-year-old German Jew, Albert Einstein, published a paper later known as the “Special Theory of Relativity“ that elegantly proposed that perspective could alter time and distance.
Mr. Einstein insisted that his theory “must be proved” by empirical evidence and proposed ways to do just that. The crucial test he asserted was that a ray of light just “grazing the surface of the sun must be bent by 1.745 seconds of arc – twice the gravitational deflection provided for by classical Newtonian theory.”
In 1919, the world learned that Mr. Einstein’s observation of that truth was correct.
As a result, Mr. Johnson continued, “the security of straight lines and absolute time in the public mind was slowly replaced with the unease that there were no absolutes at all. There were no “absolutes of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly, but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.”
Ironically, Mr. Einstein was distressed by this misapplication of science and the conflation of one truth with another. “[Einstein] was not a practicing Jew,” Mr. Johnson wrote, “but acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong. His professional life was devoted to the quest not only for truth but certitude.”
One hundred-odd years later, western civilization is in a death spiral, having reached the furthest run of that ongoing dispute: What is the Truth? Who decides? Who mediates?
Of course, this is not a new question. It dates back thousands of years to the ancient Hebrews and Greeks. To frame the question concisely, if there is a universal order of physical laws that cannot be altered or ignored, then is there a complimentary universal order of moral law that cannot be changed or unheeded? Does the certainty of the former point toward the existence of the latter?
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