Triumphal Entry

Further thoughts on objectivity

Recently I wrote about objective versus subjective truth and how the government of Canada has stated publicly that truth is not subjective. In it I asked the question "if the government of Canada says that truth is objective, then why does it insist that its citizens accept subjective truth in its place?"

Subsequent to that post I've been doing some reading concerning Canada's abortion laws, which I have found out are among the most liberal in the world.

Abortion is legal for any reason at any time, without a restriction or regulation, and is covered by the universal government health insurance plan. The partial-birth abortions banned by the U.S. Congress (but protected by President Clinton's veto) are readily available in Canada, with taxpayers picking up the bill.

So what does this have to do with the objective nature of truth?

In my previous post I pointed out that objective truth is rooted in the object rather than in the subject (person) viewing that object. In case after case, the Supreme Court of Canada and numerous provincial courts have stated that human beings are not legally human beings until they have been born.

So the object, the baby is a person but 8 inches earlier it is not. Location does not change the nature of the object, and as such does not change the objective truth of that object, or in this case the objective truth that a baby is a human being both outside the mother's womb and inside the mother's womb.

The absurdity that the courts in Canada will argue against this objective truth is seen in a case in British Columbia:

And perhaps the most bizarre decision of all was handed down by the British Columbia Court of Appeal, when they held that a physician performing an abortion has a duty of care to the fetus—not to leave it injured if the abortion is unsuccessful and the child lives.

So if you try to kill the baby its all okay just so long as you kill it while its inside the mother, but once its out, you have to work to make sure that the baby lives because it has magically become a human being deserving of legal protections.

This twisted logic is based on the very unscientific notion that a baby inside the mother's womb is the same as the mother and so ending the child's life in the womb is no different than a woman cutting her finger nails.

The Supreme Court decision was emphatic. “The only law recognized is that of the born person,” said the court in a 7-2 decision. “Any right or interest the fetus may have remains inchoate and incomplete until the birth of the child.”

An unborn child is a legal non-entity, and so therefore cannot be the object of a court's protection.

“A pregnant woman and her unborn child are one,” wrote Justice Beverly McLachlin for the majority. Her choice of words was illuminating. Her own sentence has two subjects—the woman and the child—so to say that they are one is a logical non sequitur, unless one of the two subjects is simply declared not to exist for the purposes at hand.

However, if you were to take a DNA test of the baby in the womb and compare it to the DNA of the mother, it would show, that while related, the two are distinct beings.

The Government of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada, along with provincial courts are denying objective truth in order to justify the murder of children in Canada.

Breaking! Government of Canada states that Truth is objective.

When I first seen this commercial I was blown away by its message; especially as it was coming from the Government of Canada.

"Creativity is subjective. The truth isn't."

What a powerful statement.

Truth is not subjective. That being the case, truth must be objective.

Truth is objective.

What's the difference?

Well, subjective truth is rooted in the subject, while objective truth is rooted in the object. An illustration is helpful to understand the difference. You are wandering around a mall with a friend and come upon a stand that is offering a taste test in order to determine which is better, chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream. You try both flavors and say that chocolate ice cream is better. Your friend tries both flavors and says that vanilla is the better flavor. Well which is it? Both.

In this scenario, the ice cream is the object under investigation and the two friends are the subjects. For you, chocolate ice cream is the best flavor and that is true for you, but not true for your friend who chose vanilla. To be subjectively true, something is true for you, but not necessarily true for anyone else.

What is objectively true in this scenario, is not the better flavor of ice cream, but rather that what you were tasting was indeed ice cream. You could believe with all your might that it was salad, but that would not make it true. Ice cream is ice cream regardless of what you believe about it because the truth of it is rooted in the ice cream itself and not in your personal belief.

Brett Kunkle puts it this way:

[A] statement is true when it matches up with the way the world really is. The ancient philosopher Aristotle captured the idea of correspondence this way: “If you say that it is and it is, or you say that it isn’t and it isn’t, that’s true. If you say that it isn’t and it is, or you say that it is and it isn’t, that’s false.”

[...]

On this view, is reality a matter of your subjective opinion? In other words, does reality depend on what you believe? Absolutely not. Reality is what we call an objective fact. It exists independent of what anyone believes or thinks. It is not relative to our beliefs but indifferent to our beliefs. And since truth is grounded in reality, truth itself is objective. The truth of reality does not change based upon your beliefs or mine. 

Video courtesy of The One Minute Apologist, featuring Dr. Norm Geisler.

Today our culture is rife with examples of people who profess and believe things that may be subjectively true for them, but insist that what they believe is actually an objective truth that everyone must accept. A person's gender is based on biology (xx = female, xy = male), yet there are many today that would say what a person feels, or believes about themselves (a subjective truth) is something that is actually an objective truth and must be given ascent by the masses despite what reality is telling us.

This is only one aspect of the why understanding what truth actually is matters. When we hold to the idea that subjective truth is the same as or equal to objective truth, or that all truth is simply subjective we do ourselves and each other great harm.

Which causes me to ask the question, if the government of Canada says that truth is objective, then why does it insist that its citizens accept subjective truth in its place?

When we do this, we deny reality and reality has a way of winning out in the end. Sometimes in the most painful of ways.