False Advertising
Semantics, Coherence, and the Management of Meaning
Language is not a neutral overlay placed on an already understood reality. It is the medium through which coherence is either anchored to what is real or detached from it. Because of this, semantics functions as one of the primary tools by which coherence or incoherence is engineered at the level of first principles.
When objectivity is obscured at the foundation of reasoning, coherence does not disappear. Human beings cannot function without coherence, so despite the denial of objectivity at first principles, coherence does not disappear but its source is misplaced and coherence is picked up thereafter despite denying its necessary precondition. What is logically constrained by reality itself is reintroduced later through narrative framing, institutional authority, or social consensus. The individual never loses a sense of order, rationality, and moral orientation, while remaining unaware that the source of that coherence has shifted from truth to management. It is a sleight of hand in the semantic illusion.
This process depends on a confusion about first principles.
By first principles, what is meant here are the preconditions that must already be in place before reasoning, language, or moral claims can function in any situation. These include the assumption that reality is intelligible rather than arbitrary, that words are answerable to what they refer to, that contradiction is not merely inconvenient but impossible, and that truth is something discovered rather than assigned. These are not conclusions reached after argument; they are the conditions that make argument possible. In every situation, there is the necessary logical precondition that a singular, logically neutral and therefore temporally absent element participates in order for coherence to exist. It is what grants “is” in every instance, and grants identity, causality and intelligibility to be possible. When these are treated as optional or socially granted, coherence becomes something that must be enforced rather than recognized.
Once objectivity is removed at this level, language changes its role. Words no longer serve primarily to track reality; they serve to coordinate behavior. Meaning becomes flexible not because reality is ambiguous, but because reference has been covertly severed. This allows incoherent narratives to be introduced without immediately collapsing the system, since coherence will be restored later by authority or repetition. The population experiences continuity, while the underlying constraints quietly dissolve.
This is the environment in which the theist–atheist divide is routinely misframed.
The theist is often portrayed as someone making an empirical claim about a being within the universe, and therefore as someone obligated to provide empirical proof, and whose arguments will not be considered until evidence is provided. But this framing already presupposes a failure at first principles. The objective ground that makes causality, identity, and intelligibility possible cannot itself be located inside temporal causality without rendering those very concepts incoherent. Treating the ground of coherence as an object among objects is not a demand for rigor, it is a category error.
On this point, the atheist is right to reject a temporal deity. A god conceived as one cause among others, acting within time, spatial constraints and subject to empirical detection, could not function as a grounding reference for reason or meaning. Rejecting such a conception is not an act of skepticism; it is an act of logical consistency.
What is often missed, however, is that rejecting a temporal god does not eliminate the need for objectivity at first principles. If no non-contingent reference point is acknowledged there, then meaning, truth, and normativity lose their anchor in reality. They do not disappear; they are transferred. Rights become granted rather than inherent. Truth becomes consensus rather than correspondence. Moral claims become favors granted by power rather than recognition of constraint.
This is where semantics becomes politically and socially potent. If language no longer answers to reality, it can be redirected without appearing to change. Coherence is preserved, but it is simply borrowed from the constraint it denies. People feel aligned, reasonable, and morally justified, even as the necessary criteria for alignment are quietly rewritten. The system remains stable precisely because it does not feel arbitrary to those inside it.
This is why the debate cannot be reduced to labels such as “theist” or “atheist.” The real question is whether reality itself constrains meaning, or whether coherence is something that can be manufactured, reassigned, and enforced while maintaining the appearance of objectivity. If the latter is true, then science would be an untenable pursuit.
That difference is not semantic. It determines whether truth can resist power, or whether power gets to decide what truth will be.
And it determines whether human beings possess rights that cannot be engineered away, or only the rights preserved by the status quo. Western discourse repeatedly affirms that human rights are inherent and universal. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights opens by grounding rights in reality itself, stating that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Such language only makes sense if objectivity exists at first principles, that universal facts exist, and if dignity and rights are discovered rather than assigned. These statements imply that power is constrained by truth, not that truth is constrained by power.
Yet this same intellectual culture simultaneously rejects objectivity at first principles, proudly recasting truth and meaning as contingent products of language and power. We are told that “There is no objective moral truth.” (Harman, The Nature of Morality), that “there are no facts, only interpretations” (Nietzsche, echoed approvingly in postmodern theory), that “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.” (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), or that knowledge is merely “a narrative we tell ourselves.” These are objectively worded claims deployed to dismantle objectivity itself, appropriating the language of fact to erase the authority of fact. If these statements are true, or worthy of discourse, then it immediately invalidates any Western human rights claims that declare rights as universal, since the very definition of fact is claimed to not be universal and is instead subjective by their own rationale. It is the posture of a culture that venerates objectivity in science when it serves agenda, unapologetically rejects it when it demands self-accountability, and still claims human rights to be inherent without grounding them in anything real. In this framework, meaning is not constrained by reality but constructed through discourse.
The result is a contradiction that Western societies conveniently ignore: rights are declared universal in principle, while the philosophical ground that would make them non-negotiable is denied. Human rights become rhetorically absolute but structurally empty; dependent on consensus, enforcement, and prevailing narratives rather than grounded constraint. What is advertised as inherent is, in practice, contingent. It is an insurance policy that reveals itself a scam upon filing a claim, the epitome of false advertising.