Blind men and an elephant

70-73
Is there anything out there?
Imagine that a group of people was born in one locked room and lived all their lives within it. These people have frequent discussions about the world outside. One day the argument gets more heated than usual.

Anthony
Anthony starts it all off. He tells the group that he has been studying the room for years and is at last ready to publish his findings. Careful investigation of the contents has revealed an intricate design. Could that washing machine, for example, with its five different cycles, really have come into existence by change? Does it not rather point to someone, or something, outside the room who made it and put it there? But, he has to acknowledge, no one has ever seen anything excepts what exists inside – so it is possible that there is nothing else. We just cannot know.

Bernard
By this stage Bernard is very frustrated and cannot hold it any longer. ‘There you go – nailing your colours to the fence again. Stop being so woolly! The trouble is that you are blind to reality. We can be absolutely certain that there is something out there. My mother brought me up to believe that the world outside is inhabited by big giants and little pygmies, and I have never had any reason to doubt it. The truth is that the giants put our ancestors in here years ago and have kept us locked up ever since, but the pygmies are determined to release us, and one day they will.’

Bridget
Bridget protests immediately. ‘You’ve got it all wrong’, she says. ‘You speak about “the truth”; let me tell you what it is. There are no pygmies, just giants – loads of them. And they are not our enemies – they don’t even know we are here. But they will do when the great earthquake happens and opens a hole in the wall so that we can be free.’

Beatrice
Beatrice laughs loudly. She cannot disguise her contempt for such primitive faith. ‘Grow up, your two’, she says. ‘Why can’t you face reality and recognise that there is nothing out there – there never has been and never will be.’ That is when the dispute really gets going.

Maurice
Maurice listens for a while and then loses patience. ‘Calm down! There’s truth in what you are all saying. I have to say I prefer to think of it rather differently. I like to think there is something out there. In fact, only yesterday I shut my eyes and tried to picture what it might be and a very clear image came into my mind. I say green people with white spots on their foreheads. The way I see it, they aren’t giants – I don’t like the thought of them at all – far too intimidating. No, they are our size, of not a little smaller; and very friendly – that’s what I like to believe. But if you want to see things differently, that’s fine – lets all be tolerant of one another and stop this awful bigotry.’

What are we to make of those different points of view? How can Bernard and Bridget be certain that their belief correspond to reality? And how can Beatrice know that there is nothing outside? They are all making dogmatic statements about something of which they cannot be sure. Maurice may be eccentric, but at least she is more humble. He acknowledges that his is not the only way of looking at the question. But only Anthony is being entirely reasonable. He sticks with the facts and refuses to go further. For those who have spent all their lives in a single room, any statement about the outside cannot be more than guesswork.

Anthony – Agnostic
Bernard – (believer)
Bridget – (believer)
Beatrice – Atheist (believer)
Maurice - Mystic

74
Those who are trapped inside a single room all their lives cannot by themselves discover the truth about what lies outside, if there is anything at all. But what if someone from outside came to visit them? Then they would have ‘certain knowledge’ – they would know the truth. This is the great claim of Christianity.

118
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.

Source: Distinctives – Vaughan Roberts (2000)