A few years ago I took a philosophy course at Highline Community College. On the first day of class, the instructor stood up and said, "There is no truth, and there is no right and wrong." For the remainder of the quarter I found myself subjected to odd-ball reasoning and wild conclusions. I was to walk away from the course with the following lesson: There is no way to know anything, and morality is the product of culture, so therefore, it's best to hold nothing to be true and have no morals, for right and wrong are just ideas. I did not take this lesson very well.

My teacher isn't alone in holding this philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, who uttered the infamous phrase "God is dead," thought of morality as an error, and that power, over oneself and others, is all that matters. "What is good?" he wrote. "All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness."

In his essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, "Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call 'truth' is only 'a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.'" Nietzsche is one among many moral relativists who believe that there are no universal moral truths — a philosophy that has become increasingly popular over the years.

In a similar vein, the concepts of truth, beauty and morality can all be intertwined. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," goes the popular maxim, but this idea has been challenged recently. In a Washington Post article last November, David Von Drehle discussed Stephen Marquardt, a reconstructive surgeon who used the Golden Mean to discover what he calls the "beauty mask."

The Golden Mean is a mathematical ratio denoted by the Greek letter phi and equal to 1.618. Marquardt found that a number of proportions in nature, including some in the human body, directly correspond to this number, 1.618. "Beauty," Drehle wrote, " ... is the name we give to certain signals processed instinctively by our animal brains. It isn't invented by Hollywood or fashion magazines so much as it is programmed into our DNA."

The theory is that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but is something we are hard-wired to recognize. This is why some art throughout the ages — from the bust of Nefertiti to Michelangelo's statue of David — is considered beautiful, regardless of time or culture.

If absolute beauty exists, can there not also be absolute truth? Yes, humans interpret all that they see around them in different ways, and these interpretations are often influenced by society, culture and historical and personal biases. However, even if there were no humans around to interpret what exists, things would still exist, for reality is not bound by our acknowledgement of it. Even if there were no more people, the sun would still rise, the wind would blow, the earth would shake and our world would spin. These are all truths that remain unchanged regardless of human understanding of them.

Humanity is not the author of truth. All we can do is approach it and try to comprehend it, and our understanding of truth is tainted by our own cultural and personal quirks. People thus have different understandings of truth and disagree with each other, but their disagreement has no effect on truth itself.

The same is true of right and wrong. All men have their own understandings of right and wrong. Cultures have their own morals and taboos, which sometimes differ from those of their neighbors, but even if there were no humans around to understand morality, right and wrong would still exist.

Let us take, for example, the practice of pederasty. In ancient times, adult men would take adolescent boys under their wing to teach, mentor and have sex with. It was common in ancient times, took place during the Renaissance, and even occurs in some places to this day. It was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, pre-modern Japan and China, numerous places throughout Europe and in the Aztec and Mayan civilizations before their conquest.

Our society is repulsed by such behavior. But in order for a moral relativist to remain reputable, he cannot condemn it. If I follow Nietzsche's train of thought, then pederasty must truly be good, for it "heightens the feeling of power" in the man who has sex with a child.

If morality is the result of cultural quirks, then pederasty could never have been evil, for those cultures that practiced it did so because they thought it was good for all parties involved. It can then be concluded that moral relativism is essentially a load of rubbish. Pederasty, among many other things, is a bad, evil, morally wrong practice regardless of society, culture and time, for it violates a morality that is not bound by human perception and cannot be manipulated by human interpretation. Like beauty and truth, morality is a constant, universal thing that exists whether or not man exists to understand it.

Reach columnist Brandon Dennis at brandondennis@thedaily.washington.edu.