So I was watching some videos today and I found one where they claimed that the logical absolutes were absolute as a bald assertion.

I entirely disagree. The logical absolutes exist because we’ve never had a single observation where they didn’t hold true. In fact, we can’t even imagine a situation where A isn’t A. We don’t even know what that might look like.

Therefore, the laws of logic, like everything else in rational human thought, they aren’t absolute but they certainly hold up based on every single observation that we’ve ever made. And there are a lot of people who just don’t like that.

I honestly don’t know why this is such a problem for some people but it’s really not that hard. Everyone is looking for absolutes and absolutes don’t exist, at least not in human thinking. Morals aren’t absolute. Logic isn’t absolute. Science isn’t absolute. It’s just the best that we can do given the information that we have at hand and as such, it is always changing, always evolving and hopefully, always improving.

For some reason, this makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. They want something they can rely on forever and ever and that’s simply not the reality that we live in. Science and logic, those are just man’s attempts to make sense of the world that we live in. Mostly, we’re pretty good at it, although it is a never-ending process. Sometimes we get it completely wrong. That’s life. There is no constant but change. People need to learn to deal with that.

The religious, they have a problem with that, which is, perhaps, one of the reasons for religion in the first place, other than the emotional comfort that it provides. They want eternal rules that they can follow without having to consider their ramifications. They really like the idea of permanency. Well too bad, so sad, that’s not how reality functions. Life is an eternal set of attempts to get incrementally closer to the truth. Whether we’ll ever really get there, who knows. We just have to keep trying.

Yet the problem isn’t just with the religious. Seemingly logical, rational people run into these problems as well and they are just as apt to be looking for something eternal that they can cling to as the less logically equipped. For some, logic is that thing that they think they can always count on, but they often play it off as something that it really isn’t. It isn’t magic. It isn’t perfect. It’s just a tool that we made up to help us evaluate the world around us.

Whether anyone likes it or not, we’re just not that hot. I think that’s another important lesson that people need to learn. We’re not special. We’re just an irrelevant species on an irrelevant planet in an irrelevant solar system on the edge of an irrelevant galaxy. When we inevitably go extinct, no one will miss us or care. The only ones that we matter to are ourselves. We’re just reasonably smart apes, doing the best that we can. It’s time to deal with the reality whether we like it or not.

So no, there are no laws that we invent that are perfect. Our morals are just an invention that works in the moment. Our logic seems accurate, based on what we’ve seen but who really knows? Our science is an eternally moving target that, we hope, gets closer to what’s really going on, although we can’t be absolutely sure. There are no absolutes in our knowledge. It doesn’t matter if that bothers you, it doesn’t matter if it scares you, it only matters that, based on everything that we can tell, it certainly seems to be true.

Welcome to the real world. Learn to live in it.