You Can't Handle the Truth

I wanted to write a follow-up to my post outlining my view of the truth, which needs some elaboration, and Matt Yglesias provided a good opportunity with this post on the age of the Earth (in the news because of Marco Rubio's recent difficulties with the subject, chronicled by Paul Krugman here and here).  Yglesias writes:

The key thing here is that contrary to what people often say, there’s absolutely no empirical evidence that the planet earth is 4.5 billion years old rather than 4 thousand years ago. Take the standard scientific account of what the earth was like in 2000 BCE. Now imagine that God create the universe exactly like that 4,000 years ago. He put fossiles [sic] in the ground whose state of carbon decay was just so. There’s no “evidence” about this hypothesis one way or the other. Scientific materialism just incorporates as a baseline assumption that these kind of radical discontinuities in the nature of reality don’t happen. But maybe they do?

If I were Yglesias, I would have phrased it more like this:

Well, everyone knows the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. What Young Earth Creationism presupposes is . . . maybe it isn't?

 The point Yglesias is making is rather silly, if you want my honest opinion.  But it does seem like a helpful example of how things can go astray when you rely on the correspondence theory of truth.  According to that theory, this debate about the age of the Earth can't be resolved.  You can appeal to a variety of procedural arguments, like Occam's Razor or whatever, but you can never conclusively prove things one way or the other.  This is because, to revisit my earlier point, the "truth" is meant to reside in an unknowable "real world," which could easily be a prank played by God, in which case you can't trust your senses.

I think this goes some way toward demonstrating another point I want to emphasize, which is that merely because I've abandoned the correspondence theory of truth does not mean I've abandoned objectivity and embraced relativism.  In fact, in many ways the concept of truth I believe in is less subjective/relative than the correspondence theory of truth, because it doesn't really allow for weird theories like Young Earth Creationism.  There are definitely some lurking issues about how we compare different models, but there is no reason in practice that the "empirical world" approach needs to be characterized by undue deference to crazy theories.

UPDATED to add: