Philosophy - Nothing is true? Or is mankind stupid?

first philosophical blog post. And it starts with an intellectual crisis.

The human race has a remarkable ability to be wrong. This is a recent realisation I had which sent me through a fascinating mental journey, that is unfinished and took me into areas of thought I had never entered before.)

It is extraordinary how often mankind is wrong. This mainly originates from my study of philosophy, where I have not found a single philosopher who cannot be criticised or disputed in any way. It is also true of many other subjects: we have had many scientific assumptions that have been proven false, as well as mathematical ones; literature is so subjective that there are no definite rights and wrongs at all.

My instinct was that mankind is just more stupid than we realise, but I see so much intelligence and genius, and didn't think that could be right. Therefore, I began to consider various post-modernist ideas that all knowledge is subjective and unique to the individual. What if there were no truths, and everybody had their own world in their head where what they thought was true? Somebody recently said to me that they believed that your afterlife is dependent on your beliefs. i.e. The atheist is annihilated whilst the Christian goes to heaven or hell depending on their morality. Hardly fair!

Of course, I immediately rejected this for the reasons I am an atheist rather than a post-modernist in the first place. A world with no objective truths makes absolutely no sense at all. It couldn't work, unless you think that all reality is a mental construct. And if that's the case, how do you account for what we see a mental thought? Are there degrees of mental construction? I'm not one to follow Okham's Razor, but this idea seems ludicrous.

I eventually realised what I knew all along. Mankind does not know everything, but it wants to know everything, and so it asserts certain things as truth, even though they are only theories. We are getting closer and closer to the truth in terms of how our universe works, what is moral etc. We just haven't got there yet. Or maybe we are all just a bit stupid.


[Edit]
A book I'm reading (Everything is Obvious) brought to light the distinction between common sense and reason. The book was talking more generally about the unreliability of common sense but it reminded me of this post. Perhaps many people use common sense, and the job of the philosopher and seeker of truth is to use reason to work out which common sensical truths are actually true. I have to examine views that may seem obvious to me or others. I believe that I have done this with some questions such as religion and ethics but must continue to re-evaluate and not rely on common sense, which is perhaps what many are doing.