"I only know that," the ancient Greek sage Socrates used to say, "that I know nothing." Whether the philosopher was modest, or thereby uttered yet another wisdom: our beliefs in the truth of something are always shaky, always relative and can collapse at one moment. Then can we say that absolute truth is complete nonsense in our relational, changeable world? How can we know the surrounding reality if we are not sure of the correctness of the initial positions, from which we repulse in order to come to some kind of logical conclusion? After all, even the date of our birth (provided that our parents have not mixed up anything) can also be different depending on the calendar.
But, nevertheless, in our knowledge of the world there is such a concept - "absolute truth." A certain criterion by which we can judge that certain statements are absolutely true is the logic: if we say that A is not identical to B, then it is also completely correct that B is not identical to A. But is A really not identical to B - that's the question! Often our conclusions are incredibly logically harmonious, but they turn out to be wrong, shaky, like a beautiful house built on sand. Remember: "The winds will blow, the waters will rise ..."? So our conclusions are sometimes carried, like chips, by powerful new discoveries that turn our scientific paradigm upside down.
However, we somehow orient ourselves in this objective reality, opening up more and more new horizons. The fundamental laws of the world are replaced by other fundamental laws, which sometimes supplement the former, and sometimes show their complete failure. This dialectic of absolute and relative truth guides our knowledge. The main sign that our concept of something as completely correct is being questioned is the inconsistency with our practice.
To give a simple example: while the ancient Greeks swam only between the islands of the Mediterranean Sea, the curvature of the Earth’s surface did not play a big role in mapping. Cartographers transferred the outlines of coasts and archipelagos to a flat surface and did not receive much distortion in this case. However, now that we know about the spherical shape of our planet, we, looking at the world map, take into account distortions (in this sense, the outlines of Greenland are not an absolute truth). Examples of the transformation of absolute truth into relative can be found in modern times. For many generations of sailors, the North Star has been considered a reliable reference point pointing north. This is practically true today. But, given the movement of our solar system relative to other stars and galaxies, it cannot be argued that this state of affairs will continue through thousands and tens of thousands of years.
In addition, since in our practice the North Star does not move throughout the night and its direction coincides with the direction of the magnetic compass needle, we say: “The fact that the North Star points to the north is absolute truth.” We can say the same thing about things that are true in a certain coordinate system: for example, that Moscow is 56 degrees north latitude and 38 degrees east longitude (here we leave out of brackets what exactly is in the indicated coordinates: Kremlin, Mytishchi or Lyubertsy ) Or, for example, that the Battle of Borodino took place in 1812 (if we take the Nativity of Christ as the basis of the chronology ).
There are cases when relative and absolute truth are objective, that is, in one way or another they truly reflect the existing reality. If we abstract from non-Euclidean geometry, then the statement "parallel lines do not intersect" will be completely true. However, there are other seemingly correct theories which, with the development of our knowledge of the world, turn out to be false. So, the idea of man about the geocentric structure of the world collapsed. The replacement of old concepts with new ones takes place in all sciences, not only exact, but also humanitarian. For example, historians have long considered Cathar heretics to be Manichaeans and natives of the East; now it’s not a secret for scholars that these religious dissidents were European Christians, with only a few features. The approach in which theories known to us are declared absolute leads to dogmatism, slows down the development of science, but also the opinion that everything asserted is false, leads to relativism and makes our knowledge impossible.