Absolute cobblers

Mark Braund writes today's obligatory Comment is Free faith v rationality piece:

This is not to imply that the conclusions I draw through reasoned reflection are necessarily more correct than the conclusions of those who seek guidance from religious teachings.

... I cannot claim that my non-religious world view is more accurate than the various world views of people of faith. There is no possible rational basis for such a claim. All I can say is that having had some exposure to the alternative, and having thought long and hard about it, my non-religious world view is the one the best suits me.

Well there is, and you could, especially on the basis of your own argument. Accuracy here refers to a world view, what we might slightly differently call, say, a 'view of the world'. So there is something out there, something independent of our perceptions, some object called the 'world'. This worldly thing includes humans, mountains, gasses, minerals, animals, liquids, all these sort of things. A view that correctly, or probabilistically, represents this world, could be said to be accurate, or in the second case, probable.

Once we admit there is something called the world, we can either say the world exists independent of what we say about it, or that somehow we magically construct that 'world' through acts of speech – that there is indeed no palpable world out there, nothing our concepts could ever be adequate to, for that world is merely one of of our own nocturnal imaginings. If it's acknowledged there's something out there known as the world, a specific representation or theory - utilising certain concepts, discarding others - can be judged on how it relates to this thing we call the world, whether it works or not: a map that directs us to our desired destination could be said to be accurate. One that fails is inferior and demonstrably inaccurate. Concepts that represent that world better (i.e. are more accurate) can be described as rational – those that fail to, or simply regard the world as something of a troublesome obstacle ultimately to be ignored can be regarded as irrational, as inferior descriptions or representations, of that world. Braund admits as much – he seems concerned about some phenomenon, an all-too-worldly phenomenon, called 'global warming': i.e. a theory based on certain facts and masses of scientific data, utilising certain concepts, all about that thing out there. A thing which under any other circumstance, we're apparently powerless to understand.

If we opt for the first option, that there is a material world out there, independent of our perceptions of it, the case for relativism starts to fall down – some descriptions aren't adequate to the external world, they can be falsified through experiment. Yet with the constructivist position, we're no longer talking about a world as usually defined, rather a world differently imagined by each and every individual – it's not even possible to agree any description is more accurate than any other, for we're all at liberty to construct that world just as we see fit. It's also simply impossible to define what that peculiar thing under discussion, the world, even is.

Yet the argument becomes even more baffling. For the theory, that one 'cannot claim that my non-religious world view is more accurate than the various world views of people of faith', is presented as something of an absolute fact – a true, fact-dependent description of the status of belief, science, knowledge, etc... So while, say, a rational or scientific description of the world is reduced to the realm of pure theory or faith, a theory about this apparent scientific theory – that all theories are equally accurate and fact-independent – is elevated to the status of fact. The only facts that are truly factual are facts about theories. This isn't necessarily bad, though. You can now theorise for all eternity upon theories on the status of fact-dependent theory, erecting an infinite supply of additional theories - the first being that it's definitively, logically, and scientifically, a load of cobblers.