Have you ever noticed that some people hold distinctly anti-Christian beliefs, but they can't actually live with the consequences of those beliefs?

I was recently talking with a young man who mentioned that his father was not a Christian. They dialogue about Christianity, and the son's beliefs and the father's non-belief, which I think is actually very helpful. But more so, this was interesting, because the father had sent the son an email containing an article about how, if you're not thinking about something, it doesn't exist.

Now, that may strike you as a totally ridiculous idea, but let's consider in what worldview that actually makes sense. If you hold a view of truth where things are only true if you believe them to be true, well then, doesn't it stand to reason that if you're not thinking about something, it's not true, and if it's not true, it doesn't exist?

Well, yes, that makes more sense if we think about it from that context. Now, it's still a totally false idea, (especially if I'm not thinking about it, pardon the bad joke), but it doesn't actually make sense of reality, and we'll talk about that in a minute.

First, I want to explain a little more of the context around this line of thinking, because at the heart of this is something called subjectivism. This is a view of truth where truth claims are basically just claims about people, and how they feel, and so on a subjective view of truth, something is true not because what I said reflects reality, but because I told you what I thought or how I felt. So if I think it or feel it, it's true on a subjective view of truth.

Well, this stands in contrast to an objective view of truth, where truth is out in the world, it's a property of its object, and we just reflect what the world is like, and so a statement is true if and only if I have actually described reality correctly. For example, if I say the tree is brown, and the tree actually is brown, well then I have told you the truth. Now, if I tell you the tree is green, when it's brown, I have not told you the truth (on an objective view of truth). On a subjective view of truth, I have; I've told you what I think, I've told you how I feel about it, so that must be true.

Now, why does this matter? This conversation so far may have reminded you why you hated philosophy class in college or high school, but I promise you there's a point, and the point is this: Some people want to say that moral claims are only relative to the person making them, so something's only wrong for you, but something different could be right for me, because morality is the type of thing where we decide for ourselves. So it doesn't matter if someone makes a different claim than me. They can be right, I can be right, because morality is not a feature of reality. Rightness and wrongness is not a feature of actions, it's just a property of how we think about them.

Well, obviously this stands in stark contrast to Christianity. While I said some people apply this view to morality and ethics and religions, some have realized that that's kind of an artificial distinction. Why would you just stop there? In an effort to be consistent, some people will go all the way and basically say the type of thing that "if I'm not thinking about something, it doesn't exist." That, you could say, is the natural ending point of this view of subjective truth. Why should we artificially limit it to moral claims? Why is truth only subjective there, but not everywhere else? So some people have taken it all the way. You may have heard the phrase "if a tree falls in the forest and a man's not there to hear it, does it make a sound?" Well, on a subjective view of truth, the view espoused in this article I started out talking about, no, it doesn't make a…