Question. Andrew Ottoson (Dr O), in response to my last entry, asked (via email) the question: what is the difference between universal truth and metaphysical truth?
Response. Really what I call metaphysical truth is what would more properly (i.e. more in accordance with standard philosophical jargon) be called "absolute truth." I call it metaphysical because the idea behind the notion is that it is something which has been established beyond the physical realm--i.e. it's not some physical "law" like gravity or what ever your favorite law is, but is some divine feature of the world as it has been constructed by some divine entity such as God or some Creator or whatever one believes in.
I haven't really considered what universal truth is but I suppose it is something which anyone anywhere and anytime would consider "true." So I guess that absolute (or metaphysical) truth is universal truth but not necessarily vice versa. However there are those who think that their particular system of beliefs (e.g. American Christianity) is absolute and therefore should be universal but that people are just denying the truth or some such absurd idea. I don't know, I'll have to think about it more.
Question. Dr O also asked whether it is possible to have a dialectical synthesis which represents everybody in the world, since I assume that it is possible for a community (less than the whole world) to develop a synthesis.
Response. I would say that in principle there is nothing to prevent this from happening, but I don't know if it's possible. This might be something like the completion of history in the sense of Marx or Hegel (I guess, I forget which one exactly talked about that). Somehow I don't like the idea, however. A very tentative response to the question would be that the whole world is just too diverse to allow a synthesis to construct a universal truth (in the sense above defined). This is due, in part, to human psychology I guess. We need an immediate context in which for our belief systems to operate: the whole world is too much, too broad, far from an immediate context. This is what differentiates the small community such as a local church from the whole Church body and from the rest of the world--the local community is the immediate context representing common aims of existence (business, art, communication, etc.), but the whole world represents aims which are so divergent.
I need to think more about this, the above thoughts are just my immediate response to Dr O's questions.
