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My good friend Ian Selvarajah asked me what it means to be a “true skeptic.”  It is a great question and I am very happy to explain what it means and what I believe in.  An important note:

• I am not defending skepticism nor am I arguing that it is the “right point of view.”  I am merely explaining my beliefs and what it means to be a skeptic
• I believe that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and I respect all religions and all points of view

I am a skeptic, which means that I believe:

• There is no absolute right or wrong
• There is no absolute knowledge

I will break up my argument into two posts.  This first post will address the question: Is there an absolute right or wrong?

Lets start off by assuming that you believe there is an absolute right or wrong.  An absolute truth if you will.  I will ask you, “If there is an absolute right or wrong, then this implies that there must be someone to judge what is right and what is wrong.”  By mere definition, an absolute right or wrong means that someone or something has created rules to this universe and our existence that we must follow.  If we follow the rules, then we are doing right; if we break the rules, then we are doing wrong.  Therefore, the fact that you believe there is an absolute right or wrong means that you believe someone created the rules and is judging everyone.

[Note: My mom is Buddhist and she believes that there is no God; rather, she believes that there is energy in the universe.  Doing right means that you are doing something agreeable to the energy and that you are making your life better.  Doing wrong means that you are doing something against the energy and that you will be punished (punished is a bad word to use here because it requires someone to judge and act, but work with me here) by karma later on.  For this post, I will not argue against the energy theory that Buddhism provides.]

Ok, so now we have concluded that if you believe in an absolute truth, then you believe in a creator of the rules and a judge.  Notice that I have not said God yet.  Now I will ask you, “What characteristics must this ‘creator’ have if he is able to create all the rules that ALL must follow.”  You will answer that he must be all powerful [The creator is ALL POWERFUL].  I will ask you, “What characteristic must this ‘creator’ have if he is able to know what everyone is doing and is able to judge everyone on all of their actions.”  You will answer that he must be all knowing [The creator is ALL KNOWING].  Now I will ask, “what must he have in order to be able to rule over the rules forever?”  The answer is that he must be eternal [The creator is ETERNAL].  Last question guys: what must he have so that he doesn’t change the rules suddenly so that we have no idea what to do or who to follow?  He must be all good [The creator is ALL GOOD].

Ok, so we have concluded that the creator is all powerful, all knowing, eternal, and all good.  We have just concluded that if you believe in an absolute truth, then you believe that there is a god. So I just proved that if you believe in truth, then you believe in God.  You can’t believe that there is right and wrong without believing in God.

Well that was fun.  So in order for me to disprove that there is an absolute truth, I would have to disprove God.  Before and try to do that, I must again remind you that as a skeptic, I allow for people to believe in whatever they want.  It is not my place to prove of disprove anything.  However, where is the fun in that?  I love debate and discussion.  The question of whether God exists or not is truly fascinating and one that I will try and tackle right now:

…[a good 5 minutes has gone by]  Ok, so I decided that I have not found a good argument to disprove God because that would mean that I would have to disprove faith.  Ian writes a great article on why be believes in God.  The best thing for me to do is to argue his points on why he believes in God.  I will do this in a later post.  For right now, the best I can do is ask some questions about why you believe in God:

• Do you believe you have free will?  If the answer is Yes, then you can’t believe in God.  If you believe in God, then a consequence is that you have no free will.  We will get into a deeper discussion of this on my reply post to Ian.
• Do you believe in Heaven and Hell?  If the answer is No, then you either believe that 1) There is no afterlife.  God judges you in your mortal life and you will receive rewards or punishment in your mortal life.  2) There are no rewards or punishment for right and wrong.  You simply interact with the people in your mortal life and you make life more pleasant by doing right and make life worse by doing wrong.

I can even ask some basic questions like:

• How do you know that there is an absolute right or wrong?
  • Answer: Because it is written in the Bible
• How do you know that the person who wrote the Bible was lying himself?
  • Because the words were written by God (I don’t know about this one but I’m sure religious people would argue in this way)
• How do you even know that there is a God?
  • Answer: Because I have faith.

And that is where the argument is at a stop-still right now.  I can argue every point of view except for “faith.”  I can even argue the beautiful design theory (or perfect design theory) that Ian brings up in his post.  The argument states the universe is so perfect that it is more likely that God created it than that it just was created by itself.  I will attempt to destroy this argument in a later post.

I can go on and on but now I want to tackle the consequences of believing that there is no right or wrong.  If you really think that there is no right or wrong, then there are certain consequences that arise from it:

• You cannot judge people
• You cannot impose your way of doing things onto others
• You cannot defend your points of view (which I am not doing in this post.  I am merely offering my opinions and explaining what it means to be a skeptic)
• You pretty much can’t assert things as a matter of fact.

Even the simplest things like, “This pen is blue” cannot be said by a skeptic as if it were the truth.  To a skeptic, everything is opinions.  It is my opinion that this pen is blue.  A person can walk up to me and say that this pen is red.  As a skeptic, I cannot argue with him and try to prove that this pen is actually red.  He is entitled to his opinion.

As a skeptic, I cannot impose by beliefs of “Democracy” onto another country.  As a skeptic, I cannot say that slavery is wrong.  So as you can see, being a skeptic is hard.  It’s pretty much impossible to function in society.  I can’t even say that in my culture, it is wrong to engage in slavery.  Cultural skepticism is fundamentally flawed.  Please let me know if you would like to argue why culture skepticism is flawed.

The most die hard critics will argue with me that the fact that I am writing this post proves that I am not a Skeptic.  I cannot write this post as a Skeptic.  To that I will answer, “Maybe I’m not really a skeptic.  A more accurate description of my beliefs would be that I love debate and that I love to challenge everything.  I do not like being told what to do nor do I like for someone to tell me what is right or wrong.  I am still trying to figure out everything for myself.”

I look forward to hearing your replies about whether there is an absolute right or wrong.