Leaving Truth

"Leaving Truth" offers a radically new, and potentially conclusive, contribution to our ancient science vs. religion debate. It is a collection of four essays, one main and three subsidiary. The collection addresses how we can select proposals as knowledge, and the limitations from that on the kinds of proposals that we can select. It clearly demonstrates that we have been maintaining our concept "truth" either redundantly or as an independent and reason-antithetical basis for knowledge, and that the proposals of all of our authoritarian systems of emotionally seductive irrational knowledge -- in particular, but not limited to, our theistic religions -- can only be maintained from this basis. "Leaving Truth" suggests that our past 250 years of progress in epistemology can be summarized through the injunction that we should stop asking of any knowledge proposal, "Is this ‘true'?" and start asking instead, "Can I coherently qualify this as knowledge?" It then illustrates how and why our theists cannot do this for their proposals. Its logical core demonstrates that both of the modern epistemological developments that are broadly assumed by theists and atheists alike to support the theists' position (David Hume's dismissal of Induction as our basis for "objective proof", and Karl Popper's demonstration that science can provide only "best present" knowledge, as opposed to certainty) do not do so. Readers will see that these developments instead undercut the theists' position at a level from which they cannot answer. Most simply, that from a clear understanding of the central essay's main points there can be no coherent return to acceptance of any of our authoritarian irrational knowledge systems. In this sense I believe that "Leaving Truth" offers atheists and free-thinkers a prospect for achievement of the kind clear victory at the intellectual/academic level that we have not dared to hope for since collapse of the Radical Enlightenment.