I had a student in a doctoral program in education at Teachers College who was a former police sergeant, a Catholic educated by Jesuits, and a passionate defender of the idea that if we want to value anything we must simultaneously acknowledge a spiritual world as a ground for our values. Without a spiritual ground for values, the concept of value is meaningless. I didn't feel in the class that I could express a personal opinion--I was moderating the discussion--but he was right.
It’s fine for Richard Rorty, Richard Dawkins, my dad, and any number of other highly intelligent persons to claim that we can choose our values through deliberation and conversation and without recourse to any notion of a spiritual world or creator, but, of course, they’re wrong. Any values chosen in this way are, in fact, valueless. Or the value they contain is real but its source is invisible and unacknowledged. As the rabbi said to the atheist, “the God you don’t believe in, I also do not believe in.”
We live, it’s said, in an age of relativism. From Einstein to Derrida and beyond, everything is relative. But to say this is to make an absolute statement, a groundlessly absolute statement. So what we really need to say to each other is that everything may be relative. And it may not be.
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