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What does a dog look like? What is a yo-yo? How many arms does a human have? These are some of the simplest questions to answer and most rational people will have completely sufficient answers for all of the above questions. The validity of the answers would only be doubted if the questioner had sufficient evidence to override the reasonability or rational of the respondent. This is how logic works to the average human. However, if we move into the circle of academia or higher criticism, we find a kind of disingenuous dance between common sense thought and academic thought.

There exists today a prevalent condition of irrationality when it comes to defining why one believes what he or she believes. Gone are the days of rational, reasonable argument to establish a worldview. Today, it is the exact opposite. We as a society have given up trying to rectify our beliefs with cognitive, rational thought; and instead have attempted to throw out the very laws that allow us to maintain such ignorant positions. Every human being is bound by these laws. No matter what our worldview is, no matter what our religion is, no matter what our philosophical bent, we are constrained by them and they dictate the very speech that we require as an effective means of communication.

In the great many conversations and debates I have had about religion, philosophy, and morality, I have come across a large collection of people who do not seem to understand that with their own minds, they betray their mouths. They speak passionately about the relativity of knowledge, while simultaneously needing some semblance of knowledge with which to speak so passionately. They fancify their terms in hopes that within the sea of ambiguity and scholastic language they may drown their simple opponents. They belie the very origins of human understanding that are required in order to make their case. We are meant to believe that any proposition, no matter how ludicrous or unsubstantiated, can be true. In the next couple of posts, I will demonstrate that this is not the case, and it is because of the Axiom.

As with any topic, it is important to start at the foundation. The foundations of human thought begin with axioms. The term “axiom” turned up sometime in the late late 15^th century. It was derived from the Latin axioma, which in turn was derived from the Greek of the same spelling. Axioma literally means “authority, or that which is thought worthy or fit”. Other variations include axioun meaning “to think worthy”, and axios meaning “worthy, worth, of like value, weighing as much”. For our purposes however, we will be discussing only the word axiom.

The term axiom has been used in many different ways, so it is important to distinguish our proper contextual definition from the others. Other definitions of this word amount to calling any arbitrary postulate an axiom. The most common confusion arises not out of logic but out of mathematics, Euclidean geometry to be more precise. Euclid was a Greek mathematician who applied deductive logic to a few mathematical postulates. In this context, Euclid’s “axiom” was used to mean a postulate which one was sure was true. However, it was later shown that some of his postulates were in fact false as were the conclusions of said postulates. The point of this distinction is that Euclid’s “axioms” were not axioms at all but in fact postulates.

Now that we have eliminated the ambiguity between definitions of terms, we may continue.

An axiom, in the philosophical and logical context is an irreducible principal. It does not rely upon anything exterior to itself in order to be valid. An axiom cannot be proven by any “more basic” premises. An axiom cannot be refuted as the act of trying to refute it, requires that same axiom as a premise. Any attempt to oppose an axiom can only end in a contradiction. Axioms are the foundation of all our knowledge. In our epistemology, to deny the axiom is to deny reality and truth.

There are only a three axioms that have been identified. There may be others that we have not yet identified, but to theorize about them, for the purposes of our argument is futile. In my next post, I will be discussing the first of the three axioms in detail, The Law of Identity.

These laws are a prerequisite for reason and critical thinking. Any attempt to deny these laws or to somehow attempt to argue for their invalidity, is a complete waste of time as I will show in my next post. For without these three laws, nothing anyone ever says could be effectively communicated. To argue that these laws are somehow religious in nature is a feeble attempt to escape the incredibly far reaching implications that these laws have for our cognitive process.

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