Rejecting Fallibilism and Standing on Firm Truth
George Soros is often described as a financier, philanthropist, or political activist. Each description is accurate but incomplete. Soros is best understood as a man with a worldly philosophy, one that has been translated, with extraordinary effectiveness, into social and political action. The controversies that surround him cannot be understood merely in terms of money or power. They arise from something deeper: a fundamental disagreement about whether human beings can know moral truth, whether God has made Himself known, and whether societies may rightly order themselves around that knowledge.
The Open Society: Fallibilism Institutionalized
Soros’s vision of the “open society” is not simply a political preference for pluralism or tolerance. It is the institutional expression of an epistemology, specifically, a commitment to fallibilism, the view that human beings cannot possess final or certain knowledge in matters of truth, especially moral and religious truth. From this premise follows his opposition to religious authority, national tradition, and moral realism. From it also follows his activism, his philanthropy, and his willingness to reshape societies without regard for Christian resistance. To understand Soros is to understand the revolt against epistemological certainty that animates his project.
The intellectual source of Soros’s worldview is Karl Popper, whose The Open Society and Its Enemies left a permanent mark on Soros’s thinking. Popper’s central claim is that all human knowledge is provisional and corrigible. There is no objective certainty; there is only fallibility. No person or institution may claim access to final truth. The greatest danger to human freedom, Popper argued, arises from “closed systems,” religious, metaphysical, or ideological frameworks that assert objective truth and bind societies to it. Such systems, by their very nature, tend toward coercion.
At one level, this might sound both humble and Christian. After all, aren’t we fallible? None of us can claim to have infallibility. The Popper/Soros claim is not merely about us (subjectivity), it is about the revelation of God (objectivity). It denies that we can know the infallible Word of God. It is, in that sense, another in a long line of attempts to insert something between the Word of God and us. The medieval world hid the Word from the people by keeping it in Latin. Once the Reformation did the global work of translating the Bible into every language, the attack had to be different. Now, the attack was not aimed at the Bible but at our minds. Even with the Bible, says the fallibilist, we can never know anything with certainty.
Soros has embraced this argument wholeheartedly. In his view, the primary moral task of society is not to seek the good or to conform to truth, but to remain perpetually open to revision. Certainty is not merely an intellectual error; it is a political threat. Traditions that claim moral authority (Christianity chief among them) must therefore be weakened, privatized, or displaced. The open society does not aim at a shared moral vision; it aims at preventing any such vision from taking root.
Christianity is its special target. You might note that other religions, not least of which is Islam, make claims about certainty and have a track record of violent tyranny. But for Soros and the Open Society, the roadblock to their utopia is Christianity, and they will use other groups, like Islam, to weaken the Christian influence. Their assumption is that they will always be able to hold Islam in check.
This epistemology has consequences. If no moral truth is knowable, then inherited norms possess no intrinsic authority. If moral certainty is dangerous, then stability itself becomes suspect. Borders, family structures, religious moral teaching, and national identity are all provisional arrangements, subject to deconstruction whenever they appear too settled. What matters is not whether a tradition is true, but whether it remains open to dissolution. The Open society has ushered in licentiousness and immorality, not piety and holiness.
Soros’s philanthropy reflects this logic with remarkable consistency. Through the Open Society Foundations, he funds legal advocacy, courts, prosecutors, educational institutions, media organizations, and non-governmental organizations that work to destabilize inherited moral frameworks. Immigration activism erodes national cohesion and weakens the moral authority of borders. LGBTQ activism challenges natural-law anthropology and the moral intelligibility of sex, marriage, and family. “Decolonization” reframes Western history as uniquely oppressive, undermining confidence in the moral legitimacy of Christian civilization. These initiatives are often described as humanitarian or rights-based, but they function at a deeper level as instruments of epistemic disruption.
The point is not merely to change laws or policies, but to habituate societies to the belief that no moral order is given, no truth is binding, and no tradition deserves allegiance. In this sense, the open society is not morally neutral. It is a rival moral vision. It is a vision that treats openness itself as the highest good. The only guide is Rousseau’s “General will,” or the Luciferian “do what thou wilt.”
The Conservative Pushback (and Its Limits)
It is therefore unsurprising that Soros has provoked resistance. In recent years, Western nations have witnessed a growing backlash against mass immigration, DEI regimes, and cultural self-denunciation. National identity, long treated as an embarrassment, has re-emerged as a legitimate concern. Voters are increasingly unwilling to accept the claim that cultural inheritance must be dismantled in the name of openness.
This pushback is often caricatured as reactionary or nostalgic, but at its best it expresses something more serious: the intuition that peoples, histories, and moral traditions are not infinitely malleable, and that a society cannot survive the permanent suspension of moral judgment. The promise of the open society (that all cultures would be equally valued) has proven illusory. In practice, Western cultures are asked to repudiate themselves, while others are shielded from critique. “Decolonization” does not preserve cultures; it dissolves the moral confidence of the host society while instrumentalizing cultural differences for political ends.
Yet much of the conservative response remains inadequate, precisely because it does not confront the epistemological foundation of the open society. Too often, it appeals to sentiment, nostalgia, or surface-level cultural markers. Recent AI celebrations of Englishness, for example, focus on cuisine, accents, popular fiction, or the sentimentalized past. These things have their place, but they are not the foundation of a civilization. They are the fruit, not the root.
What is missing is a defense of the deepest source of Western culture: the conviction that God has spoken, that His revelation is intelligible, and that truth can be known. England’s distinctive contribution to the world lies not primarily in its food or entertainment, but (among other things) in its commitment to making God’s Word accessible to ordinary people. The translation of the Bible into the language of the people, the missionary impulse that carried Scripture across the globe, and the willingness to invent written languages for people who had none so that the Bible could be translated, these are not sentimental artifacts. They are expressions of a profound confidence in the clarity of divine revelation. England gave the world the Westminster Confession of Faith (although in many ways also neglected it).
That confidence is precisely what Soros’s fallibilism denies. If the open society is to be resisted effectively, it cannot be done merely by defending cultural forms as such. It must be done by rejecting the epistemological premise that underwrites their dissolution.
Refuting Soros at the Root: Against Fallibilism
Scripture speaks with striking clarity on this point. Psalm 19 declares that “the heavens declare the glory of God” and that this revelation extends to all the earth. Romans 1 teaches that God’s eternal power and divine nature are clearly perceived in the things that are made, so that unbelief is not innocent ignorance but culpable suppression. Romans 2 teaches that the work of the law is written on the heart, grounding universal moral accountability.
The Westminster Confession of Faith gives systematic expression to this biblical teaching. “Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable,” it declares. This is not probabilistic or tentative knowledge. It is sufficient knowledge to render humanity accountable before God.
Nor does Scripture treat special revelation as uncertain. Jesus prays in John 17, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” The Confession affirms not only the inspiration of Scripture, but its perspicuity: “Those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded…that not only the learned, but the unlearned, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”
Fallibilism presents itself as humility, but it is in fact a form of pride. It claims the authority to judge God’s revelation (general and special) as insufficiently clear. It echoes the first temptation: “Did God really say?” You cannot be sure. No one knows. Therefore, all claims must be treated as equal opinions.
This posture collapses under scrutiny. It fails the test of livability. Soros does not act as though nothing is knowable. He acts with great confidence about which moral frameworks must be dismantled and which social outcomes are desirable. It fails the test of self-reference. The claim that nothing is certain cannot be asserted with certainty without contradiction. Why should we accept it as true? And it fails the test of Scripture, which repeatedly affirms the clarity and sufficiency of God’s revelation.
If nothing is clear at the most basic level (truths about God, good and evil, truth and falsehood), then nothing can be clear at more complex levels. If arithmetic is not clear, then neither is calculus. And if nothing is clear at all, we are left with nihilism, which is exactly the chaos motivating Soros. The open society, built on fallibilism, does not liberate humanity. It disorients it, leaving power to operate without accountability to truth. It comes as an angel of light to deceive and destroy.
Soros’s project, for all its humanitarian rhetoric, represents a continuation of the oldest rebellion: the refusal to submit to a God who has spoken clearly. By denying certainty, the open society drives a wedge between humanity and God, replacing obedience with perpetual revision and truth with process.
This is the original transcendental argument that refutes fallibilism. It is the transcendental argument that Aristotle used to prove the laws of thought. We must presuppose the laws of thought (reason) to know anything else. Any premise or argument we put together presupposes laws like identity and non-contradiction. When we refute an opponent like Soros, we do so by showing his beliefs cannot be true because they involve contradictions. Soros represents the darkened mind attempting to be crafty and appealing; our response must be clear thinking that exposes the death of sin and the eternal life promised in knowing God. We must presuppose that the basic truths about God are clear, and we must repent of not having shown this whole refuting all arguments raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:5).
God’s judgment
In Jeremiah 27:4-7, God tells Jeremiah what to say to Zedekiah. God begins by reminding them that he created all things. From there, God gets into the details of his providential rule in their lives. He raised up Nebuchadnezzar for a purpose. Israel had broken its covenant with God and would be under the covenant curse. God would also judge Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar for taking credit rather than seeing their role under God.
We can see principles here that are still operating as we read God’s providential dealings today. God disciplines the nations even as he supports his church in fulfilling the great commission. There are times when Christians are called to repent for their faithlessness toward God, for loving the world too much, and for finding their security in tradition rather than in God, the Lord. Christ is King and rides forth to conquer the hearts of men.
The most serious response to Soros, therefore, is not cultural nostalgia or political reaction, but theological and epistemological reformation beginning with repentance. A society that loves God above all else, is confident that God has made Himself known, that His moral law is clear, and that salvation in Christ is not a matter of opinion but of divine declaration, will not be easily seduced by the promise of openness without truth. Refute fallibilism, and the open society loses its moral authority. Affirm the clarity of God’s revelation, and it is exposed for what it is: a myth of neutral pluralism used to seduce the nations. It is a rival faith, a false prophet, one that cannot stand before the Word of God.
