The Age of the Sophists

Epistemological Sandcastles

Yesterday we published a piece on a false dichotomy being perpetrated throughout schools and colleges in the United States.  The dichotomy alleges that a proposition is either a fact or an opinion.  It also alleges that an opinion can never be true.  Only facts can be true.  It goes further: morals are statements of opinion, not fact.  Therefore, they also can never be true.

Suppressed in all of this nonsense are the presuppositions of empiricism and materialism.  In other words, materialism and empiricism are presupposed as truths and facts.  Then the implications are worked through to morals, facts, opinions, ethics and so forth.  Naturally, when school children and naive college students are exposed to this kind of sophistry, the presuppositions upon which their whole castle of epistemic sand is built are kept carefully hidden behind closed doors.  Concealing the family secrets is the order of the day. 

Nevertheless, the sandcastle is washed away by a simple question: is the dichotomy that a proposition is either a fact or an opinion, a fact or an opinion?  The only answer possible is that it is an opinion, and therefore, according to the dichotomy itself, is untrue.  Truth, after all, belongs only to those things which can be empirically proven as facts.

In summary, it is scandalous but illuminating that the epistemologies which reign in the secular schools of the United States in these days (that is, pretty much most schools) amount to little more than vacuous, empty sophistry.  Let us remind ourselves that the sophists of the ancient world were radical relativists, synonymous with speciousness and deception.  Nothing much has changed.  Some things cannot change their spots.

Let's get our children into Christian schools so they can be taught to think truthfully and clearly.  Anything less would be a travesty.