NationStates Jolt Archive

To believe in the world's existence constitutes for me what religion is. Simply believing in something which is not 100% certain, in order not to face the sadness of the hard and cold facts, is religion (at least in this particular inquiery).
I do believe that the world exists, or at least I want to believe in its existence, simply because life seems quite empty if it in fact does not, and I am betrayed by my own senses. Yet I have realised that, those who believe in the actual existence of the world are either cowards, those who wants to believe and therefore are aware that theyre lives are nothing but a lie, or simply ignorants, who have never doubted or questioned it all.

For my part: I'm a coward

I'm kinda disappointed.

I'm not sure what kind of response you were expecting, but I remember my philosophy teacher in college logically refuting the existentialist claim that there is not "truth" (which goes along with all of that "the world is not real" stuff). The argument goes something like this:

Premise: There is no such thing as absolute truth.

Logical Rebuttal:
Nothing can both exist and not exist simultaneously. This is a necessary fact for language to function, as I cannot describe anything unless I can be assured that it either exists or does nto exist.

The premise "there is no such thing as absolute truth" is in and of itself an absolute truth. Being as that it is self-refuting (on the grounds that nothing can both exist and not exist simultaneously), it is obviously logically incorrect.

Now being as that we can prove that there are absolute truths, it is up to us to figure out what those truths are. There are many places that you can turn if you are looking for hard, logical philosophy. Some of them are written by philosopher-priests and the like. Others by pagan, agnostic, or even aetheist philosophers.

For my part, I always thought later existentialism was bunk. I can almost get behind Kierkegaard's idea that although truth exists, we cannot completely reach it, but I cannot fathom how anyone could argue against the existence of truth, or against the existence of the world.