3 Ways ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’ Story Backfires

By Trevin Wax
The Gospel Coalition

The Parable of the Elephant and the Blind Men is a well-known story that resonates in a culture where diversity is valued and multiple perspectives are promoted.

The story originated in India and has been used in Jain, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi contexts. The most common version in the West comes from Lillian Quigley’s children’s book about six blind men who visit the Rajah’s palace and encounter an elephant.

The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant

Greg Koukl summarizes the story:

1. The first blind man put out his hand and touched the side of the elephant. “How smooth! An elephant is like a wall.”
2. The second blind man put out his hand and touched the trunk of the elephant. “How round! An elephant is like a snake.”
3. The third blind man put out his hand and touched the tusk of the elephant. “How sharp! An elephant is like a spear.”
4. The fourth blind man put out his hand and touched the leg of the elephant. “How tall! An elephant is like a tree.”
5. The fifth blind man reached out his hand and touched the ear of the elephant. “How wide! An elephant is like a fan.”
6. The sixth blind man put out his hand and touched the tail of the elephant. “How thin! An elephant is like a rope.”

An argument ensued, each blind man thinking his own perception of the elephant was the correct one. The Rajah, awakened by the commotion, called out from the balcony. “The elephant is a big animal,” he said. “Each man touched only one part. You must put all the parts together to find out what an elephant is like.”

Enlightened by the Rajah’s wisdom, the blind men reached agreement. “Each one of us knows only a part. To find out the whole truth we must put all the parts together.”

The Application of the Parable

The moral of the story goes something like this: we all have different experiences. Therefore, whenever we find ourselves at odds with others, we should be humble and recognize our limitations of knowledge, our need for other perspectives, and trust that others may grasp truths that we do not.

Applied to religion, the story says no one has the comprehensive vision of truth. We need all the religions of the world if we are going to grasp the truth about spiritual reality.

The Parable Backfires

The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant is memorable in its delivery of a message and its prompting toward humility. But as an explanation for why no religion or perspective can claim to be right and others wrong, it backfires in three ways.

1. The story undercuts its call to humility through the arrogant claim of having the comprehensive truth it says is unavailable.

Lesslie Newbigin, famous missionary to India, pointed out the flaw in the story:

“The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of the truth. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmation of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth.

“But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind there would be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.” (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 9-10)

Tim Keller sums up the contradiction this way:

“How could you know that each blind man only sees part of the elephant unless you claim to be able to see the whole elephant?

“How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?” (The Reason for God, 9)

2. The story undercuts the idea that the blind men should be satisfied with partial knowledge by revealing the full truth at the end of the tale. 

When you first hear the parable, you think the moral is to look for whatever is true in someone else’s perspective. But the story backfires when you consider that each of the blind men was wrong about what the elephant was.

In “The Elephant in the Room,” an article in the July/August 2016 issue of Gilbert, David Fagerberg writes:

“Far from being satisfied with their idiosyncratic, partial, perspective-driven, limited understanding, the blind men would have wished for the light by which they could see the whole, the true, the real, that upon which they could all agree, the final reality that would account for each of their perceptions.”

Fagerberg then applies the tale to the university setting:

“We each grope in our individual darkness (touching our part of the elephant), but the liberal arts should turn on the light so we can learn reality. The reason it is called a UNIversity is because there is one truth, one goodness, one beauty, particularized in an infinite number of ways, and we fail the elephant and we fail our own perceptiveness if we content ourselves with MULTIversity. There ought to be a reality toward which our perspectives should advance, even if it is done by dialogue.”

Instead of humbly acknowledging that we are blind and cannot see the full elephant, the story should drive us to seek the truth. In that search, we do indeed rely on others—not so we can be satisfied with multiple perspectives, but so that we can argue toward Truth together.

“The point of the story is that in their darkness the men were not seeing the elephant truly. There is a reality, and it is incumbent on us to see it accurately.”

3. The story undercuts its idea of blindness by opening the door for revelation at the end.

Notice that the story ends with the Rajah (who can see) explaining the reality of the elephant. The blind men need revelation in order to receive the truth.

Revelation changes everything. The reason the Blind Men and the Elephant doesn’t work as an illustration of the various religions is because the three Abrahamic faiths would say that the elephant, as a metaphor for God, can speak!

Greg Koukl writes:

“Even though the men are blind, the elephant isn’t necessarily mute. This is a factor the illustration doesn’t allow for: What if the elephant speaks?

“The claim of Christianity is that man doesn’t learn about God by groping. Instead, discovery is through God’s own self-disclosure. He is not passive and silent, leaving us to guess about His nature. God tells us what He is like and what He wants.

“If God speaks, this changes everything. All contrary opinions are silenced, all conjectures are put to rest. God has made Himself known, giving us a standard by which to measure all other religious claims. The parable of the blind men does not take this possibility into account. Yet three of the world’s great religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—make this claim.”

Three Intractable Problems for Atheism

By Lenny Esposito
Come Reason Ministries

Is science doing real work while people who posit a creator are being intellectually lazy? That's what atheists like Richard Dawkins would have you believe. In an interview with the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut, Dawkins claimed pointing to an intelligent designer is "a cowardly evasion, it's lazy. What we should be doing as scientists is rolling up our sleeves and saying, right, Darwin solved the big problem. Now let's take that as encouragement to solve the other big problems, like the origin of life and the origin of the cosmos."1

Is Dawkins right? In fact, he has the whole thing backwards. Darwin had the easier time constructing his evolutionary model because he didn't have the details to worry about. Scientists in Darwin's day didn't know about the complex structures of DNA or how the telltale evidence of the Big Bang proves the universe must've come into existence at a specific point in the past. Darwin could sluff over the biology. However atheists today don't have that luxury.

1. What Started the Universe?

The first problem is the most fundamental. Why does our universe exit? Why should it be here at all? Usually when bringing up this issue, you will hear people retreat to talk of the Big Bangs and quantum vacuums. But both of those things assume what is being asked.

You cannot have a bang unless there is something to go bang and something else to trigger the bang. If before the Big Bang there is nothing, then nothing cannot bang. Quantum vacuums, which have become the easy excuse in trying to solve this problem, are not nothing either. As I've explained before, these fluctuations have attributes and potentials. The fact that they fluctuate means they are in time and they have energy states. Just as an idea isn't nothing, to define quantum states as nothing is to misunderstand what nothing is. Out of nothing nothing comes is foundational to all scientific studies. If you give up on that, you're not doing science any more.

So, instead of starting with nothing, maybe we assume the thing that banged is the eternal thing. But if the singularity that banged existed from all eternity, then why didn't it bang earlier than when it did? We know the universe is using up its energy, so we know that it's only been around a limited amount of time. Why? What was that thing that changed to make the singularity explode into the universe we see? What ever it was that changed, it certainly wasn't nothing, because if nothing changed, then the universe would never have come to be.

2. What Started Life?

In 2011, John Horgan wrote an article for the Scientific American web site entitled "Pssst! Don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue how life began." There, Horgan explains how the search to understand the origin of life from nonliving chemicals has given science exactly zero answers.2 The problems are legion: the speed at which microorganisms emerged from the time that earth was capable of supporting any life is pretty fast. It really doesn't give the incredibly complex chains of molecules like DNA or RNA much time to "stumble" into the right configurations to start replicating, especially given the harsh environment and the capacity for destruction even after a fortuitous assembly.

Just what those things were that first came together is problematic, too. As David Berlinkski pointed out, there is a real chicken and the egg problem, given the need for proteins to assemble DNA or RNA and the need for DNA or RNA to carry the blueprint for those very proteins. Even the RNA Word hypotheses Horgan mentions are not immune to monstrous problems, such as the astronomical odds it would take to assemble any kind of self-replicating chain of RNA. That's why there is no functional model at all for how life came to be; there's merely a bunch of speculation containing an incredible number of holes.

3. Where Did Consciousness Come From?

Even if one were to get chemicals to self-replicate, that wouldn't be the end of the difficulty to explain how beings like us got here. While reproduction is a defining feature of life, life has different levels. A plant is a living being, but it isn't conscious; it cannot think. Human beings are known as thinking creatures. But, just how does this consciousness arise from non-conscious material? What model is there for this? Again, there isn't one.

Consciousness is an incredibly tricky thing. A lot of materialists want to redefine consciousness as the electro-chemical reactions happening in the brain, but that makes no sense. Consciousness is something qualitatively different than electrical connections, otherwise we would have to consider that our tablets and smart phones are conscious right now. Consciousness is qualitatively different from physical processes, which means that it cannot be grounded in only the physical. It requires a completely different explanation, one that science cannot offer.

In his article, John Horgan is honest in reporting that science is completely in the dark concerning the beginning of life. Yet, he balks at one workable explanation available to him, the idea of a creator. At the end of the article he writes that creationists' "explanations suffer from the same flaw: What created the divine Creator? And at least scientists are making an honest effort to solve life's mystery instead of blaming it all on God." Of course, this is as old as it is uninformed. Asking what created the creator is like asking which golfer is going to win the Daytona 500. It's a clear category error and is really Horgan's way of ignoring the only other option out there.

These three problems should offer clear signs that there is more to the world than matter in motion. Science is a field that relies upon observation to draw conclusions. In our entire history, no human has ever seen a thing come from nothing, seen life emerge spontaneously from non-life, or seen consciousness emerge from unconscious matter. It just doesn't happen. So why would anyone think all three happened, and happened without the guidance of any intelligent entity? If you're a golfer in Daytona, you can pull your driver from your bag, but it won't do you much good in this competition. Scientists can continue to talk about these problems, but they won't get any closer to the answer.

References

1. Teitelbaum, Jeremy. "The Dean and Richard Dawkins." UConn Today. University of Connecticut, 10 Apr. 2014. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. http://today.uconn.edu/2014/04/the-dean-and-richard-dawkins/
2. Horgan, John. "Pssst! Don't Tell the Creationists, but Scientists Don't Have a Clue How Life Began." Scientific American. Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc., 28 Feb. 2011. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-but-scientists-dont-have-a-clue-how-life-began/.
Image courtesy rosipaw and licensed via theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license.

Why Russell’s Teapot Fails

By Nate Sala
A Clear Lens

Oftentimes, when discussing the existence of God with atheists (or agnostics), the notions of supporting evidence and burden of proof are raised. This is important as good evidence provides a foundation for a reasonable inference on this issue, as well as the idea that those who make claims must support them with some kind of evidence. For example, if God exists then there should be some evidence to support claims of His existence. And, as Christian case-makers continue to show, there are a number of evidences that support the existence of God.

Unfortunately, some atheists believe that there can be no evidence for God whatsoever; and it is from this mistaken presupposition that a particular strategy involving a teapot floating in space has emerged. So the argument goes: we cannot conclusively prove that there is not a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere in outer space; but, given the lack of evidence for such a teapot, its likelihood is so low that the reasonable conclusion should be that it does not exist. Likewise, we cannot conclusively prove that God does not exist; but, given the lack of evidence for God, the reasonable conclusion should be that He does not exist.

This particular argument originated with philosopher Bertrand Russell in a letter he wrote in 1958:

“I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.”[1]

A number of decades later Richard Dawkins commented on Russell’s idea in The God Delusion:

“Russell’s point is that the burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. Mine is the related point that the odds in favour of the teapot (spaghetti monster / Esmerelda and Keith / unicorn etc.) are not equal to the odds against.”[2]

There are a couple of problematic elements in Russell’s and Dawkins’ comments. First, they both assume that there is no evidence for God. At least, it seems that Russell’s presupposition is that there is no evidence, thus allowing for his analogy; and Dawkins appears to accept Russell’s analogy wholesale. Second, Dawkins claims (via Russell) that, since there is no evidence for God, theists are the only ones that bear the burden of proof. This reminds me of a similar strategy amongst some atheists that attempts the same result, i.e. placing the burden of proof squarely on the theist’s shoulders. To read more on that, see “Why Atheism Is Not a Lack of Belief.”

Here is the problem with Russell’s presupposition. When an atheist states that there is no evidence for a teapot floating in outer space, he likely means there is no empirical evidence for it. In other words, to say that there is no evidence is to say that, as far as we know, no one has seen or touched a teapot in space. But to suggest that evidence for God is the same thing as empirical evidence for a teapot is to misunderstand the evidence for God typically appealed to by theists. As Dr. Brian Garvey writes, “God is invoked as an explanation for… why the universe exists at all, why it is intelligible, why it is governed by laws, why it is governed by the laws it is rather than some other laws, and doubtless many more things.”[3] Therefore, the evidences for God are the universe, its intelligibility, its physical laws, etc.

Russell’s analogy fails in large part because it likens two different sets of evidences, i.e. evidences for an object and evidences that are effects of an explanation. Russell’s teapot is not an explanation for anything. It simply exists as a rhetorical device. God, on the other hand, is an explanation for a number of things. With regard to the universe itself, consider the Kalam Cosmological Argument:[4]

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

Or a form of the Teleological Argument appealing to fine-tuning:[5]

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

In both arguments a causal agent, namely God, is inferred as being the explanation for the universe, as well as its features. This does not mean that God is a physical object floating in space, like a teacup. It just means that God is an inference to the best explanation. Considering God as an explanation for the universe (as well as the universe as evidence for God), Dawkins’ comment on the burden of proof should be reevaluated.

Whether or not Russell’s floating teacup actually exists is irrelevant to the universe: as I stated earlier, his teacup is not an explanation for anything. So one’s worldview of the universe is not devoid of explanation if Russell’s teacup does not exist. However, if God does not exist there must be another explanation for the universe and its particular features. To illustrate consider Garvey’s chart below:[6]



So in contradistinction to the theist who proposes God as the explanation for “the most general laws,” i.e. the properties of the universe, the atheist proposes “something other than God.” So atheism is not a passive enterprise by any means. It is a proposition that reality is explained by (other than). Thus, both theists and atheists are looking at the same evidences (the universe and its features) and drawing two different conclusions. This means that Dawkins’ assertion, that the theist is the only one who bears the burden of proof, is flatly false. Both parties have their own burdens to bear.

While Russell’s teapot is probably not very popular anymore (considering its circular nature), it, nevertheless, still floats around the internet (pun intended) as useful fodder for those who don’t know any better. However, its failure is largely due to the disanalogy between evidence for a teapot and evidence for God. So the next time you cross paths with Russell’s floating teapot, have an apple, and then an orange.

[1] Bertrand Russell, “Is There a God?” in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell Volume 11, ed. John G. Slater (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997): 547-548.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York, NY: Bantam Press, 2006), 76.
[3] Brian Garvey, “Absence of Evidence, Evidence of Absence, and the Atheist’s Teapot” Ars Disputandi 10 (2010), 18.
[4] J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 468.
[5] Ibid, 484.
[6] Brian Garvey, “Absence of Evidence, Evidence of Absence, and the Atheist’s Teapot” Ars Disputandi 10 (2010), 18.

How a Christian Worldview Influenced America’s Founding Fathers

By Andrew Stebbins

It might be fair to say that most Americans tend to take our freedom for granted. We forget that our freedom was hard-won and is not guaranteed. In fact, the liberties we cherish are privileges not many societies enjoy. Tyranny, in its many guises, is the historical norm. In truth, we do have an extraordinary amount of freedom in the United States, and there are profound reasons for that stemming directly from our Christian heritage.

As the founding fathers set up a new government, they started from what scholars consider a Reformed Christian worldview. Of the 54 signers of the Declaration, 29 were ordained ministers, and most of the others were deeply religious men. The idea that the majority of the founders were deist is an exaggeration passed on over time, as only a handful might be claimed as such, and even this is difficult to verify by our understanding of the term.

The founding fathers’ Christian worldview was “the single greatest influence on the content and interpretation of America’s foremost founding documents: The Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution (1787), and the Bill of Rights (1789).”¹

The biblical worldview can be summed up in three words: creation, fall, redemption. These three words birthed the equality of all humanity before God (creation), human nature as evil (fall), and the inherent value of the individual (redemption). These ideas lay at the root of the formation of modern democracy everywhere, most especially in America.

1. Equality of All Humanity before God

The Christian notion of equality says that people are equal because (1) God made humanity in His image; and (2) He loved us enough to have sacrificed His Son for each of us. Rather than being based on abilities, appearance (race, ethnicity, sex), achievements, or social position, a person’s worth is inherent. We are equal simply because God values us equally. Human worth is God dependent and God ordained; human assessment is irrelevant. The founding fathers recognized this view of humanity in the Declaration of Independence’s famous opening statements:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

The Christian view of equality runs counter to common human impulses and is unique to the Christian West. In most of the world’s cultures, social hierarchy is more or less rigidly prescribed and the rules of social engagement are correspondingly tight.

2. Human Nature as Evil

People often falsely equate being kind and considerate with being good. In the Christian worldview, however, God holds His creation to a far higher standard of goodness based on His law. Because of our fallen nature, humans fail to reach this standard.

This idea is also unique to the Christian worldview. Most worldviews see human nature as good, or at least not evil. The Confucian worldview, for example, and most modern secular humanistic worldviews, see humanity as inherently good.²

The founders’ Christian worldview, buttressed by their experiences, left them with a profound distrust of human nature.³ They believed that man could not be trusted with absolute power over their fellow men. By creating a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances—both of which were written into the Constitution⁴—the founders made it difficult for any individual or branch of government to gain too much control over human affairs.

3. The Inherent Value of the Individual

Despite our fallen state, God was still willing to sacrifice His Son, giving each of us an opportunity for salvation. Jesus’ redemptive act alone shows the incredible value God has accorded to each individual. In most societies throughout history, the individual is not the locus of identity. For most of the world, a person’s identity is subsumed in the group(s) they are a part of. The collective is the locus of identification, and is of far greater significance than the individual. Christians, however, hold a high estimation of individual worth and this biblical view was not lost on the founders.

So committed were they to the idea that any system not governed by the people would ultimately lead to tyranny that the founders enshrined this idea in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They believed the individual should have the right to partake in electing his representatives. This belief, in itself, was a radical notion for a government, brought on by the founders’ belief in the inherent value of the individual.

In creating the Bill of Rights, the founders sought to further protect the rights of the individual; Only a high valuation of the individual could possibly result in a society granting all people, regardless of race, gender, or social position, inalienable rights that no one, not even the king, could infringe upon.

Such ideas are unique in themselves, but even more so in combination. Their overarching influence in the formation of American democracy has been so strong that it is difficult to imagine our system of governance forming under any other ideological circumstances. These ideologies were central to producing the right of the people to choose their leaders, the separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, and the notion of the inviolable rights of the individual.