Lets talk about the big bang.

I think that you quite mistaken about a great many things.

Oh do you? Why's that? Because you believe in the real and explicit existence of God and I don't? So it suits you to pretend to think that I'm mistaken about other things too?

One thing I'm not mistaken about is that you are full of pretence. You are not an honest person because your aim is to attempt to make others think that you can win an argument with me. You know you can't make me think that because your comments here are empty.

If your thoughts had real substance, you wouldn't continually hide and pretend. You would have more confidence than you show yourself having. You have no intention at all of engaging in an honest discussion with those who disagree with you and you make that clear.

I can at least talk about the things I believe in without going after the people I'm talking to. If a conversation gets heated typically it is due to personal observations about another person, as if they alone are the reasons for disagreements instead of the ideas about the universe around us.

It's possible you don't know you were being combative and passive-aggressive. You can't rely on others to tell you. Most of them just like watching the fun. I did try to tell you right at the beginning.

I wouldn't worry about it though. If you can make adjustments, do so. There are some weird people in these forums and it can be easy for some people to get defensive. Just try to be more communicative and more accepting of other people's thoughts.

You are very accusatory and demeaning.

if that's all you can manage in reply, then I no longer wish to discuss anything with you. You are certainly not interested in discussing anything with others and one wonders why you are even here. I'm afraid that you demean yourself by the way you interact. If you made it more of a pleasure to discuss things with you and didn't have such a hostile attitude, you would have more pleasant discussions. Approach them as you have done, with discourse laced with passive-aggression; and interactions with you will be an unpleasant experience.

Perhaps you think it's normal, since there are two others in your orbit who seem to habitually do the same. Unfortunately for you and those trying to talk to you, it isn't normal and there are those of us who refuse to put up with it. You just crossed a line by not taking seriously my attempts to get you to understand the need for polite behaviour.

This club is exceptionally ridiculous. Perhaps most clubs are ridiculous if they are merely a means for apparent children to try to grow up by interacting in a world they have created without outside interference from moderators. But this is an extreme example and utterly disproportionate. The list of moderators is sufficient to put anyone off from joining. I thought I'd try to test it out but the pollution here isn't going to go away so it's best to leave this club to die of its own accord.

All truth is not absolute. At most, it is both absolute and relative.

However, we normally think of truth as relating to accounts, which are considered true if their content relates accurately to the reality which the accounts describe.

It's difficult to describe and communicate the reality of what truth is. Whether you understand it depends on whether you honestly try to understand it. At the moment, you are mixing up truth with reality, which is a fundamental mistake that impacts on your ability to communicate effectively, so try to understand my words.

That was a freebie.

If your so-called "truths" are relative then yes they are not absolute, opinions may be a better description. Anything that is"absolutely" true is not relative, if a fact is true it will remain so regardless of how we view it. We can use the temperature in my room right now as an example its 69 degrees, which is an absolute fact, at this time in my room it's 69 degrees. It does not matter what the temperature in the room you are in right now is, in mine, it is 69 degrees which is an absolute fact, not a relative one because where you are is hotter or colder.

If I raise or lower the temperature then the absolutes facts will change according to the new reality in my room.

You continue to question my intellect and honesty, please stop that!

What is 'truth'? Philosophers define it this way I think: "Truth is the set of all true statements"

I find that beautifully succinct.

A (propositional) statement can only be true if it accords with fact. If there's no matter of fact involved, a statement is little more than an opinion.

Truth is what lines up with reality, to go a little deeper, true statements that do not line up with reality are not true.

It's also an appallingly bad definition, philosophically speaking. The reason for that is that it's completely circular and self-referential, as we can see clearly. Moving back from that. it's possible that "some philosophers" might well try to define it as that but it's doubtful they would be looked on as good at philosophy by others, who understood about epistemology.

They could possibly be logical positivists, who aren't really regarded as philosophers. Bertrand Russell was a logical positivist. He was a mathematician and logician and he's a philosopher in the same way that Richard Dawkins is a philosopher. That is "not at all".

So only a statistician might attempt the banal definition that "truth is the set of all true propositions". It doesn't in any way define truth and therefore such a definition is not part of the set of true propositions in any case.

No it's not - it defines Truth in terms of what is True. If we have a clear understanding of what can be said to be 'True' regarding some matter and we're able to express that in truth-valued statements, then declaring that all Truth is nothing more than the aggregate of all true statements is perfectly reasonable.

It isn't circular in the least because it doesn't attempt to define what is True in terms of broader Truth.

Your opinion may be that truth is an absolute but that's your opinion. If I were to argue that absolute truth is impossible (if we're being pedantic) then many people would agree with me. An absolute truth can only pertain to a reality but truth or falsehood apply not to reality itself but only to statements about it. If it were to be applied to reality itself well, you can call "reality" "truth" if you prefer but it isn't meaningful to do so.

My intellect is sometimes questioned here on this site too. I wouldn't worry. It tends to happen where someone is being misunderstood. You say that the temperature of your room is 69. It may well be so. Also, your thermometer might be malfunctioning, you could be misreading it or you could be lying. However, no-one's really going to question that because it has no importance to others, whereas it may be the case that your conception of truth being absolute is based on some kind of religious doctrine. Then it will appeal maybe to people who believe a similar doctrine and not to those who don't, so again we can't really arrive at an absolute truth about it. All we can do is give our opinions on the subject and compare them or relate them to one-another.

i keep trying to tell you that there is no need for you to be so confrontational. It's a disease you may have caught from one or two others here or there.

Anyway, a claim that truth is absolute, when looked at in an understanding way, becomes a statement that tor the individual concerned, truth is most meaningful when it's regarded as absolute, so that the aspect of truth most important to the proposer is that on a subjective basis, the proposer wants to regard it as absolute and perhaps, wills it into being absolute but, of course, it becomes a personal thing. It is absolute relatively to the beholder of the truth.

A philosopher might attempt to give a definition of truth in such a way that it fitted one context only but such a definition would be context-dependant. No philosopher would attempt to define truth as the set of all things that were true, unless he were a logical positivist but then, it's contentious as to whether he could be regarded as a philosopher. It would be similar to a statistician, defining "blue" as the colour that is perceived by observing every member of the set of blue things. Such a person wouldn't be seen as a philosopher by other people who are philosophers. Certainly not, in reality.

You see? It's because it's self-referential only. At the very least, someone regarded as a philosopher would try to give examples of different perspectives and conceptions formed by different philosophers throughout the ages. That would be the most likely approach from an academic perspective. Students would be implicitly invited to find which perspective appealed most to them and then do further research. But a philosopher who tried to offer that definition as the best definition of truth would be laughed at, in the same way that Bertrand Russell was laughed at by philosophy lecturers of the department of philosophy at the university where I obtained my philosophy degree. The Professors would be more circumspect and probably wouldn't laugh at Russell; but only out of deference to philospophy. Not out of any deference to Russell.

You water truth down to make it all relative, if all truth is relative then you are claiming absolutely all truth is relative, contradicting yourself.

I may seem to you to be contradicting myself if you can't understand what I'm saying! I don't think you understand what is meant by "truth is relative" and I have stated that it is both absolute and relative at the same time, so I'm certainly not contradicting myself, even from that simplistic perspective.

Do you know what is meant by a proposition? It's almost equivalent to a claim, but it isn't an egotistic thing. It's hypothetical. So you are making a proposition that "all truth is absolute" or whatever. You see yourself as making a claim that it's so, perhaps, but it's better for all of us if it's viewed as a proposition, because it can then be examined and no-one's feelings are going to be hurt, if and when it's agreed that we can't view truth as absolute except in a kind of fictional context where we posit the existence of a source of truth.

That is partly because truth does not relate to existence. We do not say "the existence of that dog over there is true. We don't need to because we can see it. But we do wonder about the truth of things like the Big Bang, which really just look like simplistic or childish models which are thought, by childlike people, to be a reasonable portrayal of the probable origin of the universe. Since the mathematics of the Big Bang is known not to work, we can reject it, especially as there's a much better scientifically based proposition.

Regarding the definition or description of truth, that's similar. We really don't want to get into a battle between a religious believer who says that truth is the knowledge of God and a non-believer who says that truth is in fact a description of accounts of reality which are correct or true when compared with that reality, iff it's possible to do so.

Iff = "if and only if".

Well, you are full of contradiction, it is both absolute and relative, may as well say it is both truth and false, right and wrong, good and evil. If it is absolute it isn't relative if it is relative it is not absolute. You may as well say there is no such thing as truth, and that is the truth.