Relativism and the Fallacy of Totality

Since the start of time, man has been on a never-ending search of knowledge. Through the various senses, as well as through the exploration of one's thoughts, man has arrived at this vast pool of knowledge at the present time. In many disciplines, particularly science, man chooses to believe that facts, or absolute truths, exist about the world we live in. Such a truth, which applies in all circumstances, is known as a law. What I would like to demonstrate though, is that these laws are in fact, not absolute truths, but bound by the limitations of relativism.

By relativism, I am referring to the idea of relativity. We understand that some property is relative if it is being compared to that same property exhibited in a different object, or scenario. The relative velocity between two objects, for example, is the difference in the absolute velocities of the two objects, such that it will appear to a person standing on one of the objects that the other object is moving at this velocity. Knowledge, in the very same way, is also relative. Much as man would like to think we know everything, our knowledge is at most a small subset of the entire set of knowable knowledge. Having acknowledged this, it is then applicable to claim that laws of science, so claimed, are simply relative laws. That is, the law of gravity, that we know of, only exists within the boundaries of our knowledge. We cannot claim that gravity always exists everywhere, because we do not know everywhere. Likewise, any positive truth (by positive I mean truths that claim x rather than NOT x) about causality or nature is relative to the set of known knowledge. When we say, if I drop a ball, it will fall to the floor, we actually mean, as far as I know, when balls are dropped they fall to the floor, so I assume that when I drop this ball, it will fall to the floor too. In this way, the truth about the ball falling to the floor is held relative to the set of total knowledge that we possess.

This conclusion is of particular importance to questions involving divine omnipotence and omniscience. The nature of God's omnipotence or omniscience has long been a debate in religious and philosophical circles alike, thus it is a matter worth examining. I claim that we, as humans, cannot claim that God is either omnipotent or omniscient. When we say that some being or entity is omnipotent, we are trying to say that that being or entity "is capable of everything". But as I have discussed above, man does not know what "everything" is. Therefore they cannot make this claim. They however, can claim that God is relatively omnipotent, that is, God can "do anything man knows can possibly be done". This, I believe, resolves the classical paradox of omnipotency, which is "can God make a boulder so heavy that he couldn't lift it?". If we think of God as relatively omnipotent rather than omnipotent, this question would not arise, because then we can relieve ourselves of the burden to prove that God can prove "everything", since it is impossible to prove given that we don't even know what "everything" is. The same therefore, goes for omniscience. Relative omniscience, which I believe in, is the belief that God "knows everything that humans know" at least.

The theory of relativism is therefore somewhat of a compatibilist theory, for it is accepting the possibility of an absolute truth. I do not deny the existence of gravity, merely stating that gravity only exists in the set of situations that we know of. Relativism thus states that we can never claim a positive absolute truth if we do not know the entire set of circumstances which the truth can operate on.