The Blind Men, The Elephant, and the Person Who Somehow Sees Both

In this post, I’d like to address some often stated claims: “All religions are basically saying the same thing.” “There are many paths to the same mountain top.” “Who are you to say your religion is the right one?” The person may often use the analogy of the mountain, where there are many equal paths to the peak. The paths representing the various religions and the peak representing God, implying that whatever religious path you take, it all goes to the same God. Another often used parable is that of the blind men and the elephant. In this parable, a group of blind men encounter an elephant for the first time, each touching a different part - the trunk, the leg, the tusk, etc. Because they experience different parts, they argue over whether the animal is like a snake, a tree trunk, or a spear. Ultimately, they realize that while each of them is partly right based on their own limited experience, they are all wrong about the animal as a whole. The parable teaches us that our personal perspectives represent only a fraction of a larger reality, and each religion is only grasping a partial truth. 

To be fair, the people who hold these positions are usually well-intentioned. Nobody wants to be the person at the dinner table who says "My religion is right and yours is wrong". It comes off as arrogant and exclusive. That being said, I want to flag something important. When someone says “all religions are equally valid,” they’re actually smuggling two very different questions into one claim, and the conversation goes sideways almost immediately because nobody stops to separate them. The first question is whether all religions are equally true - whether their actual claims about reality are all correct. The second question is whether God, if he exists, condemns people who hold different beliefs or accepts all people equally regardless. These are not the same question. You can answer one without answering the other, and conflating them is where most of the confusion in this conversation comes from. Let's address the former question first.

The “many paths up the mountain” analogy is probably the most popular way to make the case that all religions are equally true. The idea is that religions are all just different routes to the same destination - God, enlightenment, ultimate reality, whatever you want to call it. It all sounds very inclusive and accepting. The problem is that it only works if the religions themselves actually agree about what’s at the top of the mountain, and they don’t. For example: Christianity says God is a personal Trinity who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, died, and rose bodily from the dead. Buddhism, in many of its major forms, doesn’t affirm a personal God at all and holds that the self is ultimately an illusion. Islam affirms one God but explicitly denies the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Hinduism, depending on the school, may affirm that ultimate reality is an impersonal absolute that the individual self is ultimately identical to. These aren’t just different cultural expressions of a shared feeling - they are direct logical contradictions. Jesus either rose from the dead or he didn’t. God cannot be one person and also three persons. The self either exists as a real, continuous entity or it doesn’t. All cannot be true at the same time. The mountain analogy only works if you already assume the conclusion - that all the paths are heading somewhere compatible - and they aren't.

When philosophers talk about truth, the most commonly defended account of truth is what's called the Correspondence Theory of Truth. To simplify, a claim is true if it corresponds to the way reality actually is. The claim "there is a glass cup on the table" is true if and only if there is in fact a glass cup on the table. This claim is true regardless of the person's sincerity, the intentions of their heart, or any other matter. Feelings about tolerance have no bearing on the answer either. The “all paths” view, taken seriously, requires that contradictory claims are simultaneously true. Saying "all religions are equally true" is like saying "there are square circles" or "he's a married bachelor". None of this means we can be certain which religion has it right, or that the question is easy, or that intellectual humility isn’t called for. It absolutely is. But humility about which claims are true is not the same thing as saying all claims are equally true. Those are very different positions. 

Let's dive deeper into the parable of the blind men and the elephant: A group of blind men each touch a different part of an elephant and come away with different descriptions - one says it’s like a snake, another like a tree trunk, another like a spear. The point is supposed to be that each religion is grasping a different part of the same ultimate truth and mistaking its part for the whole. It's a better analogy than the mountain, but it has a fatal problem: for the analogy to work, someone has to be able to see the whole elephant. The person telling you that all the blind men are touching the same animal is not himself blind. He has access to the complete picture that the blind men lack. So when someone uses this analogy to argue that no religion has the full truth, they are implicitly claiming to have a privileged vantage point above all religions from which the whole truth is visible - which is exactly the kind of claim they were accusing religious believers of making. You can’t say “no one can see the whole elephant” from a position of having seen the whole elephant. The analogy is self-refuting.

Now, the reason most people are drawn to the “all paths” view in the first place isn’t really a philosophical argument - it’s a moral intuition. It’s the feeling that a good and just God wouldn’t condemn sincere, decent people simply because they were born into a different religion, in a different culture, with different access to different information. It isn’t actually an argument that all religions are equally true, it’s an argument about how God judges people - which is the second question. A doctor can be a thoroughly good and decent person and still be wrong about your diagnosis. His sincerity doesn’t make the wrong diagnosis correct. In the same way, a person can be sincere, virtuous, genuinely seeking and still hold beliefs that don’t correspond to reality. These things are separable. So the question becomes: even if all religions aren’t equally true, does God hold people accountable for beliefs they arrived at in good faith given the circumstances of their lives? To answer this, I need to carefully state the following response to this question is my own - I am not speaking on behalf of all Christians, all denominations, or any other group. While I consider myself an Eastern Orthodox inquirer, I by no means represent the Orthodox Church. 

To begin, this question is where a lot of serious theological traditions have actually had very nuanced things to say. Aquinas wrote about invincible ignorance - the idea that a person who has never had meaningful access to the truth through no fault of their own cannot reasonably be held responsible for not believing it. C.S. Lewis, in The Last Battle, imagines a man who spent his life serving the false god Tash with genuine sincerity and virtue, and who is received by Aslan on the grounds that no truly good act can ultimately belong to a false god. Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium formally addressed the possibility that those who have never heard the Gospel, but who sincerely seek God and follow their conscience, may be extended mercy by a God who is not bound by the visible structures of the Church. These are serious attempts by theologians to hold together two things that only appear to be in tension: that truth matters, and that God is just and merciful toward people based on what they actually had access to.

Now, let's look at what scripture and the early church fathers had to say on the matter. In Christian theology, Christ is the logos through whom all things were made (John 1:1-3). This means all truth, beauty, and genuine seeking of God is already participation in Christ, whether the seeker knows his name or not. Looking to St. Justin Martyr, this is what's called the "Spermatic Logos", i.e., the seeds of the Word (logos) scattered throughout all humanity: 

    "Those who lived according to the Logos are Christians, even though they were called godless -         such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus." (First Apology, 46)

Justin is saying that Christ is universally present, and that sincere response to that presence, however partial and incomplete, is a response to Him. 

    "For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to         themselves...their conscience also bears witness". (Romans 2:14-16)

Paul, in this verse, explicitly discusses Gentiles (which are basically non-Jews), who, without the Torah or Gospel, act in accordance with divine truth. Their conscience participates in the divine Logos. Paul says they will be judged "on that day" - implying eschatological accountability and potential mercy, not automatic condemnation. There are other various scriptural accounts that support the inclusion of those who do not believe in Christ but still act in love: The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25), The parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31), God's impartial justice (Acts 10:34).

The point, stated clearly, is this: ignorance does not condemn a person, but neither is ignorance a free ticket to salvation. The Orthodox Church has always been cautious about drawing hard boundaries between who is or is not saved. The Fathers consistently teach that judgement belongs to God and God alone. No person can declare anyone damned or saved, nor can the person judge the salvation of him/herself. As Paul writes:

    "I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself.         My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me." (1                Corinthians 4:3)

The Orthodox Church has a saying: "We know where the Church is; it is not for us to say where the Church is not." Even those with no knowledge of Christ or with imperfect conceptions of God can participate in salvation through the universal presence of God. This is not to say that the Church adopts some sort of universalism or religious pluralism. There are those that will orient their will away from God, away from the source of life. The same light that is loved by those who love God is blinding to those who hate Him. However, the answer isn't as simple as this post makes it sound, and explaining the Eastern Orthodox view of salvation, Hell, etc., would require another post in itself. I'll end it here. 

The point isn’t to settle the question of who gets in and who doesn’t - that’s well above my pay grade. The point is that “religious truth matters” and “God may extend mercy to sincere seekers outside the church” are not contradictory positions. You can hold both. What you can’t coherently do is say that because God is merciful, truth becomes irrelevant - that’s a non-sequitur. Nor can you say that because truth matters, every sincere person outside your tradition is simply condemned. The “all paths” view tries to solve the moral problem by dissolving the truth question, and it ends up doing neither well. The better path is to take both questions seriously on their own terms, without pretending that answering one automatically answers the other.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Universe Called - It Demands an Explanation

It's been a few years since I've last posted. I'm going to stray away from the Aristotelean/Thomistic metaphysical themes of my last posts and go back to some basics. The aim for these future posts is to create some easy to read arguments and defenses of the Christian faith - for myself because it's good for me to brush up on topics I've put on the shelf for a long time and also to provide the reader that may be unfamiliar with the topics to have something that's fairly easy to follow. 

That said, I want to begin with what I find to be the stronger arguments for God's existence. I will put forth a straightforward argument in a syllogistic format (so, premises that reach a conclusion) and defend each premise, then follow it up with responses to some common objections. Let's begin with the Argument from Contingency:

The argument begins by asking a simple question: why is there something rather than nothing? We are not asking how did the universe form, or when did it begin - but more fundamentally - why does anything exist at all? It's easy to just say things exist and that’s just the way it is. But when we think a little harder, there didn’t have to be a universe. There didn’t have to be space, time, matter, energy, or laws of physics. There didn’t have to be anything at all. And yet, here we are.

The argument from contingency doesn’t just attempt to answer what caused the universe. It attempts to answer why contingent things - things that could have not existed - exist at all. 

The argument runs like this:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence - either in the necessity of its own nature, or in some external cause.

2. The universe exists.

3. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence.

4. The explanation of the universe cannot itself be contingent.

5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is something that exists necessarily.

An argument is only as good as it's premises, so let's look at each premise individually:

Premise 1: Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence

Before diving in, we need to make an important distinction. We need to distinguish between things that exist contingently versus things that exist necessarily. Think of the word 'contingent' akin to dependent. For the most part, everything we experience in our natural world is contingent, i.e., it depends on something else to exist. The plant in your home depends on you watering it, the soil that provides it nutrition, etc. You, yourself, depend on your parents in order to exist. If your parents did not exist, you would not exist. Science itself attempts to explain why the natural world is the way that it is - how did life come to be, how did stars, planets, the solar systems form. If something exists due to something external to itself, it's contingent.

Now lets look at what it means to be necessary. For the purpose of this post, let's distinguish between metaphysical necessity and natural necessity. To start with the latter, you depend on your parents to exist and therefore your parents are necessary for your existence. That does not mean, however, that your parents are necessary in their nature. They also depend on something in order for them to exist, mainly, their parents. And on and on it goes. 

Metaphysical necessity, in contrast, basically means there is no possible circumstance in which it could have failed to exist. Regardless of the way the world is, what events could have happened but did not, it's existence would obtain in every possible world. There is nothing external to itself that is giving it existence or accounting for its existence.

Now let's turn to Premise 1. This premise holds most of the weight in the entire argument, and in philosophy it's known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). Strip away the jargon though and the idea is fairly intuitive. Things don’t just pop into existence for no reason. If you walked in to your living room and found it completely destroyed and someone said, “it just happened, no explanation” that would be the last answer you’d accept. You’d want to know why it happened, how it happened, and who, if anyone, did it. The demand for explanation is baked into how we think about reality.

The PSR simply formalizes that intuition: every contingent thing that exists has an explanation for its existence. While a strong claim, let's consider what you have to believe to deny it. You have to believe that some things just exist, full stop, no reason, no cause, no explanation - not because we haven’t found the explanation yet, but because there fundamentally is no explanation and there couldn’t be one. That's not a simple 'we don't know', that's a deep metaphysical claim that, at the very foundation, there is no explanation and could not, in principle, be one. This metaphysical claim is what's called a brute fact.

However,  the denial of the PSR would make science impossible since our entire scientific enterprise is built around searching for explanations. The moment you allow “it just exists, no reason” as a legitimate stopping point, you’ve reached intellectual bedrock. If the universe can be a brute fact, why can’t anything else be? Why do any explaining at all?

The PSR is also self-undermining to deny. To say “some things have no explanation” is itself a claim that demands an explanation - why those things and not others? Who decides which facts get to be brute? The denial of the PSR relies on the PSR to even get off the ground.

Premise 2: The universe exists

No argument needed here. What are you, a solipsist? 

Premise 3: Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence

This just follows from premises one and two. If everything that exists has an explanation, and the universe exists, then the universe has an explanation. The only escape is to go back and attack premise one - which, as we’ve seen, comes with some metaphysical baggage most don't want to carry. 

Premise 4: The explanation cannot itself be contingent

This is probably the more controversial premise, and the one that gets the most pushback. But suppose, if you will, you grant that the universe needs an explanation, and then someone says “Fine, some other contingent thing caused it.” Maybe a prior universe, a multiverse, some quantum vacuum fluctuation, what have you. The problem is immediate: now that thing needs an explanation too. You’ve just moved the question back a step without actually answering it. And if the explanation of that thing is yet another contingent thing, you’re off on an infinite regress - an endless chain of things, each one borrowing its existence from something else, with the whole chain dangling in midair and nothing actually holding it up.

To be sure, let's think of it another way. Say you want to borrow an Ipad, so you ask your friend who says “I’ll lend it to you once I borrow it from my friend,” who says the same thing, on and on forever. No one in that chain actually has the Ipad. The borrowing can’t happen. Eventually, the buck has to stop with someone owning the Ipad. An infinite regress of contingent things is the same problem - nobody in the chain actually has the existence to pass along. At some point, the explanation has to bottom out in something that doesn’t need an explanation - something that carries its own existence necessarily, that couldn’t not exist. Otherwise you don’t have an explanation, you just defer the explanation to something that also needs an explanation. 

To drive the point home, let's say the universe explains itself. Maybe the whole is explained by its parts. However, this also doesn't work. The universe is the totality of all contingent things - things that didn’t have to exist. And what you get when you add up a collection of things that didn’t have to exist is… a collection of things that didn’t have to exist. One doesn't squeeze necessity out of contingency by piling more contingency on top of it. The question isn’t answered, it’s just restated at a grander scale. 

In fact, the explanation cannot be something physical at all. All physicality is contingent. It could have a different mass, velocity, color, behave differently, etc. Additionally, there is nothing logically incoherent about matter not existing at all. The Big Bang shows that at some point in the past, the universe began, meaning, at some point, there was no universe and then there was. 

Premise 5: Therefore, the explanation is a something that exists necessarily.

Since Premise 4 established that the explanation of the universe cannot be a contingent explanation, the only other option is an explanation that is necessary. It has also been established that anything of made of matter cannot, in principle, be necessary. The only option we are then left with is something that exists necessarily and immaterially. When we look closely, it seems we are stuck with only two possible options that fit this description: abstract objects or minds.

Let's turn first to abstract objects: numbers, mathematical truths, logical laws - exist necessarily. Two plus two couldn't equal five. The law of non-contradiction couldn’t be false. To be sure, regardless of the millions of different ways the universe could have been, two plus two would always equal four. The law of non-contradiction would always be true. However, abstract objects and laws of logic don’t cause anything. The number four has never made a single thing happen in the history of the universe. Mathematical structures don't produce any sort of reality, they just exist abstractly out there in the ether. So whatever the necessary thing is, it’s not a Platonic abstraction. As such, we need an option that is immaterial, necessary, and causally efficacious, leaving the next option:

Minds. Mind's are characterized by their capacity to act. Will, intention, and agency are the hallmarks of a mind - and these are irreducibly causal notions. This is the only candidate that satisfies the conditions of being both immaterial and necessary while also being causally efficacious.

Additionally, the only way to account for why a necessary cause produced a contingent effect - a particular universe, at a particular moment, with particular features - is if the cause has will. The ability to freely choose to act or not act, to create this rather than that, without being mechanically compelled to do so. What you’re then left with is a being that exists necessarily, is not itself part of the physical universe, is not a mere abstraction, and acts by free will rather than mechanical necessity. 

Now that the premises have been defended, let's look at some common objections:

Objection 1: “Well then what caused God?”

This is, by far, the most common objection and also, by far, the least sophisticated. The objection assumes God is the same kind of thing as the universe - a contingent thing that needs an external explanation. But that’s precisely what the argument denies. The necessary being at the end of the argument isn’t just another item in the inventory of things that happen to exist. We've already shown that that kind of explanation doesn't work for various reasons. The mind deduced by the premises in the argument conclude a being whose non-existence is impossible - one that exists by the necessity of its own nature. It doesn’t borrow its existence from anything else, because it couldn’t not exist in the first place. 

The question, essentially, is a category mistake. Think of it like asking “what’s north of the North Pole?” or "What does the color blue smell like?" The question sounds coherent until you realize it’s asking for something the concept doesn’t leave room for. Asking what caused a necessarily existing being is the same kind of mistake - it applies a category that simply doesn’t fit. The argument was never that everything needs an external cause. It was that everything contingent does. If we place God among the chain of other contingent explanations we would still need to look for something necessary that explains the chain in the first place, and then that would be God.

Objection 2: “Maybe the universe itself is the necessary being”

This one is slightly more sophisticated than the last. Why drag in God at all? Maybe the universe just is the necessary being - the thing that exists at the bottom of the explanatory chain, requiring no further explanation. Some physicists discuss something like this when they talk about the universe being “self-contained” or having no boundary conditions that require outside explanation. If the universe necessarily exists, the whole argument is dead in the water before it even gets going.

The problem is that calling the universe necessary doesn’t make it so, and everything we know about the universe screams contingency. A necessary being is one that couldn’t possibly have been otherwise. But the universe obviously could have been otherwise. It could have had different physical constants - and not just slightly different, but radically different. The fine-tuning literature alone documents dozens of parameters that could have taken vastly different values. It could have had different laws of physics, different initial conditions, or simply not existed at all. When you look at the universe, you’re looking at something that wears its contingency on its sleeve.

Objection 3: “Maybe some underlying law of nature, or abstract principle, is the necessary being”

This objection was briefly discussed in my defense of Premise 5. While also similar to the second objection, instead of saying the universe itself is necessary, they point to something more fundamental - the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, mathematical structures, logical principles, or some bedrock feature of reality that exists necessarily and from which everything else follows. 

This objection has some merit because mathematical and logical truths do seem to be necessary. Two plus two couldn't equal five. The laws of logic couldn’t be otherwise. But as I previously discussed: abstract objects, necessary as they are, don’t do anything. They have no causal power whatsoever. Mathematical truths don’t reach out and instantiate physical reality. 

A law of nature, in the abstract sense, is just a description of how things behave - it’s not an agent that makes things happen. We see a pattern in the natural world and then attach a law that describes that pattern. To say “the laws of physics caused the universe” is like saying “the rules of chess caused the game". The rules don’t cause anything - they describe what happens when players are already in play. 

So this objection ends up giving us something necessary but causally inert - which is precisely what the argument from contingency needs to explain away, not explain with.

Objection 4: “An infinite regress of contingent causes is a perfectly fine explanation”

This one is often stated, but fails from multiple angles. Maybe the universe doesn’t explain itself, and maybe abstract objects can’t cause things. But who says the chain of explanations has to end anywhere? Maybe it just goes back forever - an infinite series of contingent causes, each one explained by the prior one, with no first cause required. Infinite regresses are mathematically coherent, after all. Why does the buck have to stop somewhere?

However, the point of an explanation is to account for why something exists rather than not. An infinite chain of contingent things - each one borrowing its existence from the one before it - never actually provides that. Every member of the chain is the kind of thing that might have existed. The whole chain is therefore the kind of thing that might have existed. And an infinite collection of things-that-might-not-have-existed doesn’t magically become something-that-had-to-exist just by being infinite. You’ve explained each individual link by pointing to the one behind it, but you haven’t explained why there’s a chain at all in the first place.

But there’s another problem with infinite regresses that's more concrete. Infinite regresses are perfectly coherent in mathematics. The set of all negative integers is infinite, for example, and there’s nothing contradictory about it. But mathematics describes abstract, timeless structures. Physical reality is different. For an infinite regress of past causes to actually obtain, an infinite number of real events would have to have actually occurred before we arrived at the present moment. And here’s the problem: you can’t traverse an infinite series. If the past is infinite, you could never reach now - because no matter how far forward you count from an infinite past, you’re still infinitely far from the present. The fact that you’re reading this sentence means the present exists. Which means the past cannot be infinite. A beginningless series of physical causes isn’t just philosophically unsatisfying - it’s the kind of thing that sounds coherent in the abstract but falls apart the moment you ask whether it could actually happen. 

Objection 5: “The universe could just be a brute fact - some things have no explanation”

Also mentioned earlier, let's forget infinite regresses and necessary universes - some philosophers just bite the bullet and say the universe exists for no reason whatsoever. It’s a brute fact. It’s just there. No explanation, no cause, no reason. The demand for an explanation of the universe as a whole is simply a demand that can’t be met - and doesn’t need to be.

However, most people don’t realize what they’re actually signing up for to accept this view. To say the universe is a brute fact isn’t just to say “we don’t know the explanation yet.” It’s to say there is no explanation, there couldn't be one, and that’s just how reality is. This is a rather sweeping and dogmatic claim that has consequences that go well beyond cosmology.

The entire foundation of science rests on the assumption that things have explanations - that the universe is rationally intelligible and that asking “why?” is always a legitimate move. The moment you allow brute facts as a stopping point, you’ve given that up. Why does the universe follow regular laws? Brute fact. Why does anything at all exist? Brute fact. Why are the constants of physics what they are? Brute fact. At some point “brute fact” stops being a philosophical position and starts being a magic wand you wave at questions you don’t want to answer. If we permit even one brute fact, we've lost grounds for demanding explanations of anything. To be sure, any criterion we use to demarcate what's considered worthy of being a brute fact and what isn't would itself need an explanation and thus move the goal post indefinitely.

Additionally, there’s something self-defeating about it. To say “some things just exist with no explanation” is itself a claim about the fundamental structure of reality - a claim that, per the PSR, demands an explanation. Why is reality the kind of place where brute facts are possible? If the answer is “that’s just how it is” - well, now you’re using the PSR to justify denying the PSR. The position tends to shoot itself in the foot.

The argument from contingency doesn’t just gesture vaguely at a “first cause” and call it a day. It follows the question of existence to its logical end and finds, waiting there, a being that is necessary, immaterial, and personal - one whose non-existence is simply impossible and whose will is the only coherent explanation for why a contingent universe exists rather than nothing. Every attempt to deny one of the premises - brute facts, infinite regresses, self-explaining universes, causally inert abstractions - either relies on the very rationality it’s trying to undermine, or fails to do the explanatory work required. 

However, it's worth being clear about what the argument establishes and what it doesn't. The argument concludes that there exists a necessary, immaterial, and personal being whose will accounts for why anything exists at all. While not nothing, it is also not everything the typical Christian would like it to prove. The argument does not show that this being is the God of Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism, or any God in particular. It also doesn't show whether this being has revealed himself to humanity or issued any moral commands, or takes any interest in human affairs whatsoever. For all we know, this being could be entirely indifferent to everything that happens in the universe. A different type of argument will be needed to show that kind of being exists.