In short, my answer is YES. But that’s not good enough, now is it?
To go a bit deeper, let me return to my previous analogy of children. Kids understand the world as they experience it. This can cause embarrassing moments for parents when their kids expect that everyone has the same experience that they have. But children are also very moldable. It takes a pretty sheltered childhood to prevent a kid from having his reality shaken up by change. When your life amounts to less than a decade, even small changes can stir up the soup. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, they have an uncanny way of adapting to changes, usually quicker than adults, stuck in our worlds of routine and predictability, are able to. Perhaps it’s a survival tactic—when you’re little, you’ve got to develop ways to cope with a big world.
So our little Ecuadorian girl from Part One packs her bags and moves with her family up to Greenland with our other friend (probably not likely, but run with me here), and suddenly the world isn’t so blistering anymore. She gets to build snowmen and go sledding and experience that painful feeling your fingers get when you walk into a warm house from the cold. To her, it’s a different world. It’s a different reality. And it’s just as true as it is back at the middle of the globe where the sun burns all day long.
Let’s be clear: there are absolutes involved in all of this. It is absolute truth that the sun casts more rays onto the region around the Equator, making average temperatures hotter there than anywhere else on the planet. It is also absolute truth that the areas closest to the Earth’s poles receive the least direct sunlight, keeping things pretty darn chilly (though our polar bear friends would remind us that it’s not quite as chilly as it once was). These are truths that are beyond questioning.
They are also truths that reveal themselves in varying levels of significance to different people. Their meaning is certainly relative to those by whom they are experienced. Consider this: even the definition of the word “absolute” itself is relative. Humans invented language. Somewhere along the way, I imagine there was a primordial debate about the meaning of life and someone suggested a concept that involves an unchanging reality that is the basis of our existence. What to call this idea? And so the caveman word for absolute was developed. Over lots and lots of time, languages died, were created, and evolved, and eventually there was one called English. English included a word for this concept, “absolute,” and through the centuries, the meaning of that word was refined and reshaped by the culture of which it was a part. Today, there’s nothing truly absolute about the word “absolute.”
Relativity is scary. It means that what we believe might not always hit the nail on the head. It means that the dude we’re vigorously debating with at the coffee shop could actually be right. I think that’s okay. Why be afraid to encounter more out there than what we’ve already found? Why shy away from a groundbreaking discovery?
Is there absolute truth? Yeah, I believe so. Have we absolutely uncovered it? I truly doubt it. That’s why the heart of life is a search for the truth. We claw our way to the mountaintop, only to find that there’s another peak to scale. Now and then, we find a piece of truth that moves us from Ecuador to Greenland. How do we respond? We sell everything we have and invest our whole selves into that nugget that will shape the next leg of our journey. We adapt. And we keep on living.
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