Objectivity and Atheism

[fdesilva]

As an Atheist there has been a nagging confusion in my mind regarding objectivity and how it is used in arguments either for or against God.  Let me preface by saying that in college I studied some continental philosophy and was particularly influenced by Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger.  A common theme among these philosophers is that truth always begins with a human subject.  Out of the "lived world" we grapple for truth and form our basis for knowledge rather than receive knowledge from outside us through either empirical knowledge or logical proofs.  I could go into way more detail but the point is that I'm inclined to agree with these thinkers and I guess ultimately I hold the belief that Truth/Objectivity whatever you want to call it is always in some ways subjective.  

Lately I've been watching a lot of debates between theists and atheists (particularly the so called "New Atheists") and obviously the point of these debates is to argue that one position is better than the other.  The assumption being "my truth is better than your truth".  The confusion for me is that philosophically I have a hard time reconciling my belief that truth is subjective while simultaneously agreeing that one side of the argument is better.  Does anyone besides me have a problem when these debates focus almost exclusively on the objective nature of the arguments and almost never on the subjectivity of human knowledge?   Maybe someone could help clear this confusion for me.  Thanks.

I think that the confusion about what is objective and what is subjective is a direct consequence of how humans acquire knowledge. Let me demonstrate this with an example. Let’s say there is a colour blind person living by him/her self in an island. Has not come in contact with anyone else.  In these persons world there are no colours. Thus He/She does not recognize colour as an objective property of any object.  Now why is this so for this person. It’s because this persons consciousness is incapable of creating models of the real world objects that also assign a colour to it. So what needs to be recognized is that the engine of Truth, Fact, knowledge etc  is consciousness.  So in my thinking I  see it all as follows.
Acquisition of knowledge by humanity is dependent on the consciousness of the individual. When a person makes an observation and comes to an understanding, this understanding is this person's subjective knowledge. If another person, on making a similar observation, arrives at a similar subjective understanding, this knowledge they share can be taken to be part of humanity's objective knowledge. Thus, all of humanity's objective knowledge is a subset of all of humanity's subjective knowledge; that is, there can be no objective knowledge that has not been some person's (dead or alive) subjective knowledge. Thus, an intrinsic assumption behind all of humanity's objective knowledge is the similarity of the axioms of consciousness of the individuals.