The Issue of Axioms and Undefined Terms

It may be surprising that I start here of all places, but this is often times where much of the conflict between where worldviews starts. Propositional logic starts with some fundamental assumptions that are often unable to be be proved. “Water is wet.” We know that’s true, but we can’t really define what “wet” means without using a synonym or coming back to “having a similar essence to that of water.” Its just a true statement that everyone agrees on without the ability to break to down anymore and people come to common agreement on what all the words in that sentence mean and the larger meaning of that sentence.

However, a problem occurs when people can no longer agree on such a consistent “language” to talk to each other with. What if I made a statement like “water is wet,” but we couldn’t agree on what the words “water” or “wet” were or what the essence of the verb “is” meant? We’d have a hard time communicating if even a few important words were up for grabs to mean different things. So what about words like “good” and “evil”? What about “love” and “hate”? How do we define the word “god” or “God”? You may notice that it’s capitalized sometimes and lower-case other times. Does that change its meaning?

Unless you can agree on such things, it’s nearly impossible to have a conversation about morality, ethics, philosophy and theology. It’s hard, but not impossible. It may be necessary sometimes to flesh out some definitions at the beginning of the conversation or to stop at certain points to ask, “When you use that word, what do you mean by that?” It shows that you are listening and that you care to understand the person, just let them finish their thought before you stop them when possible so it doesn’t appear that you are always interrupting them.

There will be some words that can’t be defined though and this creates a huge issue if we can’t agree on what those words are supposed to mean. So, when possible, I’ll try to explain what I mean when I use certain words where the meaning of what I’m saying could be interpreted differently to different worldviews. I can’t help using some undefined terms and that will mean that we have to have some common understanding of certain things for us to have some of these discussions. If you have questions, please ask and I’ll do my best to try to answer any honest questions that help move the conversation forward.