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Originally Posted by abaya
(Where the hell is Pigglet, I am finally getting around to his question!!)
I see it a bit like an asymptote constantly approaches the axes of a graph... always getting closer, but never touching. The asymptote cannot exist without bounds to constrain it... hence the absolute. Science cannot do what it does without a reality, an absolute, to constrain it... even if it never reaches it fully.
plusses
Actually though, I don't quite agree that the existence of order leads to a belief in an absolute. At least, it doesn't for me. You can have chaos and still have absolutes, too.
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Me is here....uppitty woman!
Now I see your asymptoticalitude...I would tend to agree. I would say that I believe there is an absolute reality, which is beyond my perception. All of my measurements and comparisons and so forth approximate this absolute reality, but never measure up. Ergo, yon asymptote, I believe. However, I can't prove this absolute reality exists, nor can I prove it does not. It is, however, as convenient as any other theory and I tend to think it makes the most sense. If I'm wrong, and absolute reality doesn't exist, what have I lost. It seems to me that if the opposite is true, and it doesn't exist, then none of this "life" crap means anything, and I might as well go ahead and end it. Skip all that getting old crap and broken hearts and watching people suffer and so forth.
I think that the presence of order might strongly imply an absolute reality. Chaos is ordered...I don't know enough chaos theory to say if we have any observations of randomness that extend so far up and so far down in our measurement scales that they can't be averaged out...but it seems that we contain randomness within some bounds, no?
The question I would return to then, is are there absolutes in morality? It seems like most of the discussion in here has centered around physics, with the exception of rodney's mention. I know this has been discussed before, such as
linky link link . I tend to believe that there are certain moral principles that tend to be absolute, in the sense that they appear over and over again, due to the fact that in most situations these principles are the most likely to maximize individual freedom within the constraints of social stability, so to speak. Does an absolute moral code exist, in the same sense that an absolute reality exists (if you believe such does exist)? I tend to think of morals as an expression of the order of said reality, so I would argue that they do exist within our perceived relationships of the workings of reality.