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ANNOTATION:
Absolutely no Absolute Truth
If there is no absolute truth, then the statement that there is no absolute truth is not absolutely true :^)
But seriously, I will agree that humanity's best criterion of truth is its power to give predictions. But implicit in that statement is an external, absolute truth. For what are human theories trying to model and approximate?
If I make the statement that "I ate at Chuy's Mexican restaurant yesterday", that is a statement that does not produce any predictions -- and by the author's definition, "a statement that does not produce any predictions is...true". But that statement has an external truth -- either I was at Chuy's or I wasn't. But even if I wasn't at Chuy's, by the author's definition I was telling the truth. More correct would be to say my claim that I ate at Chuy's is not verifiable given our current model of the world. Now if we were to add the statement "everyone who ate at Chuy's yesterday has food-poisoning", my statement now helps produce a prediction -- that I have food-poisoning. Moreover, in the author's world, if I did not get sick, then my statement would suddenly change from true to false. But although the author's model of the world may change, the external truth of the statement remains constant -- either I did or I didn't eat at the restaurant.
So given that there is truth external to ourselves, if we apprehend that truth, the source that reveals it is irrelevant to whether or not that truth is absolute. The problem lies in verifying the absoluteness of the truth regardless of its source. The author correctly states that most important statements produce infinitely many predictions and thus are theories which we cannot verify absolutely, only reject when they give false predictions. Thus even when if we have absolute truth revealed to us, we humans are not capable of verifying it.
Which brings us to the problem of faith, or what the author calls "sheer self-deception". Faith is a willingness to accept a statement as truth without a complete proof of its truth, especially when it is known that the statement cannot be humanly completely verified. With respect to theories, which the author states "we cannot directly verify", the author also writes that "we have to believe that it is true". If this applies to scientific theories, then it certainly applies all the more to metaphysical theories. More importantly, it applies to the statement "theory X is absolute truth" in the same way it applies to any other statement. The statement "theory X is absolute truth", in the author's world, is indeed meaningful and falsifiable, as it generates important and meaningful predictions -- for example, that any theory Y that conflicts with theory X will generate some false predictions. And as such, it deserves to be treated with the same respect that any other statement in the author's world gets.
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