The absolutist is correct in asserting that it is self contradictory (or at the very least unproven) to say that relativism is *the* truth. The fact that we have not found "the truth" after so many years of searching for it does not prove that it doesn't exist, although it is strong inductive evidence for absolute truth's non-existence. We will never be able to prove that the clouds will not part tomorrow and reveal everything the way "it really is".

But until that happens, an epistemology that defines truth with this kind of criterion is pretty useless to us, because we don't have anything that resembles such a wondrous substance. What we need epistemology for is to able to tell our good theories from our bad theories, not to define and describe something we have never seen and probably never will see. And despite the common assumption made by most relativists, we can tell good theories from bad theories, which is why science is better at what it does than it was 100 years ago.

The general consensus among historians and philosophers of science is that our current science contradicts the science of the past, and that it is most likely that current science will be contradicted by future science. If we have a criterion for truth which says "true theories are those that describe the real world as it is, was and always will be, and false theories describe only illusions, which exist in the mind", we are forced to conclude that all of our theories are equally false. But all this proves is that this criterion is a bad criterion because some of our theories *are* better than others, even though none of them apparently possess this wondrous attribute of being true in the absolute sense. The fact that they are not true in the absolutist's sense, however, does NOT mean that they are all false, any more than the fact that no one possesses Vital spirit proves that everyone is dead.