Thursday, January 31, 2008

Rationalism, Empiricism and their cousin Postmodernism

Our world has just been hit by the next wave of epistemologies that being Postmodernism. For many who have reflected hard on Rationalism and Empiricism they have come to the conclusion that they are flawed and unable to give true knowledge of the world. For those the next step was Postmodernism. Postmodernism basically claims that there is no truth or real interpretation to reality. We must construct our own and this is very much like rationalism and empiricism. Certainty is based on our first principles.

Language and subjective ideas are ultimately a contingent creation of human beings. It cannot represent any objective knowable reality. Our signifiers cannot be known to connect with the signified reality outside of them. Besides, language creates our sense of reality; it cannot describe a reality independent of itself.

Nietzche claimed that there are no facts but only interpretations (or constructions) created according to ones particular need to enhance ones life, what he called the will to power. There is no true world only a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us.6
We might think Postmodernist are mad, but in fact they have come to the logical conclusion that a world without God or of an eternal objective interpretation of world makes the idea of truth meaningless. For what Nietzche proclaimed as the age of the "death of God" was in fact the death of truth.

The problem with Postmodernism is that it claims that there is no truth, but is this an objective claim? If there is no truth is the statement true about reality?
We have clearly seen that once one reject’s God’s revelation, man loses his understanding and place in the world. By suppressing God’s knowledge man loses all knowledge. The truth is that rationalism and empiricism dose give us true knowledge of the world, because we live in God’s world. God has given all reality an interpretation and we have been created in his image with knowledge that connects to the interpreted world outside. Our thoughts correspond to objects and our facts relate to other facts because they are all related to God’s eternal unit of truth, his eternal interpretation of all things.
There is a rational relationship connecting all finite things.

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