When one shares an observation like, “This grass is really green,” and someone replies, “Duh,” one has either inadequately emphasized the exceptionality of a green tint or stated something so obvious it barely bears mentioning. Such statements are what we might call in ordinary parlance, ‘self-evident’—a truth so plain that no emphasis or argument is needed. But this sort of “truth,” if it could be called such, relies exclusively on the commonality of our senses, with no deeper philosophical or moral purchase.
In the famous line of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” self-evidence carries far more weight. It avers that the equality of rights of all mankind are axiomatic—beyond debate, beyond proof. Yet that very document that asserts this truth excludes entirely the rights of women and reduces for the express purposes of representation, that the enslaved count merely as three-fifths of a person. Thus, the concept of equality, promoted as being foundational, was in practice—and in many ways still is—deeply compromised. We continue to honor this lofty sentiment, often despite observable facts to the contrary. In doing so, we blur the line between what is self-evident to our senses and what is a moral imperative—a truth to be aspired to, but regrettably, not one we perceive as a reality. If these truths were indeed self-evident, why do we still struggle to realize them?
In actual fact, reference to self-evident truths is often a way of precluding critique. Conventional religions, and increasingly ‘scientific’ circles, enforce a party line on their participants that has been specified by a theology, or physical theory. I don’t know whether anything could be done with religions to make them more reasonable and relevant, but it certainly could, but isn’t, done with scientific truths. After creation from nothing the universe is supposed to have expanded by fifty orders of magnitude in the first fraction of a second before slowing down to expansion as usual until it required an acceleration but may have experienced deceleration before that. That would require a tremendous amount of unexplainable and hence ‘dark’ energy in addition to a required amount of unexplainable ‘dark’ matter to keep the galaxies and stars within their orbits. There is a logic tree that would describe how we got here one step at a time. Like: the observed redshift was taken to imply recession, since there’s the same recession in all directions with no center, the expansion is supposed to be in the four dimensions of space-time, etc. Each of the branches of this logic tree that we consider to be foundational have become so entangled that each branch is seriously in need of pruning—maybe grafting in a new variety.
We must each evaluate each branch of this tree with regard to whether pruning or grafting is required if the truths we accept as self-evident are to become anything more than compliance with a party line.
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