The Truth About The Elephant

"The Truth Is Out There" is the primary slogan of Agent Fox Mulder from the X-Files. Every person, in his or her own way, is constantly in search of the truth. But truth is entirely subjective, so everyone's search for the truth tends to be different. Some choose to seek is by sitting around drinking beer while they watch sit-coms. Others take LSD-25, some go to church, others spend their lives reading, some do yoga, some dance, some are poets, some are scientists, and others think that the truth is already known and that we fog it all up with our search.

The word "truth" we use to denote an explanation for something based on a logical conclusion made from the evidence presented to us to deduct such a conclusion. But what if we don't have all the evidence? Then it is not the truth. We can say that O.J. Simpson did it. But if it turned out that extraterrestrials had implanted a control mechanism in his brain to forcibly madee him shoot his girlfriend, then obviously we did not have all the evidence, and therefore, the wrong "truth".

I believe that this can be summed up quite easily in the old Hindu story of a group of blind men touching an elephant, while each comes up with a completely different conclusion of what the elephant is (and each happens to be wrong). The first blind man feels the trunk and says that it is a vine. The second blind man touches one of the legs and says that it is a tree. The third feels it's side and says its a wall. A fourth feels the tusk and thinks it's a pipe.

Of course, they are all right, but ultimately wrong. An elephant has all the qualities they describe by touching the elephant, the reason their guesses of what it was is so different is because they were each examining a different part of the body. I believe much the same thing can be said about religion. Christians have a different view of the deity than Hindus do, as it is with Muslims, Pagans, mathematicians, Scientologists, Mormons, etc... I throw in mathematicians because many mathematicians find religion in science and numbers. I have a buddy who is of the Pi religion, since pi is an infinitely long irrational number. Therefore, any finite string of digits can be found somewhere in pi, such as your very own birthday, your name in numeric format (A = 1, B = 2, C =3, etc...), or anything you can think of, and therefore an "all-knowing" number in a sense.

We all have different concepts of the deity simply because we are each feeling a different part of something we cannot see. As Jalal al-Din Rumi said it : "The sensual eye is just like the palm of the hand. The palm has not the means of covering the whole of the beast." Lovecraft once said, and I paraphrase : "To understand fully who and what God is would lead to insanity." And perhaps he is right. Perhaps this is the natural circumstance of defying Gödel's theorem (truth and proof of the truth cannot exist simultaneously).

But it seems by our very own nature that we will never come any closer to the whole truth. We would rather kill and bomb one another over whether it is a pipe or a tree or a wall. Rather than actually sitting down nicely together and trying to work it out as a group, we would rather create sides. All our descriptions are correct. It is our conclusions that are incorrect. Not even scientists and mathematicians, especially mathematicians since Kurt Gödel, are ultimately correct. The same friend I mentioned above hated the ending of the show Lost because he felt the wrong side won (i.e. mysticism). Ultimately, there is no "side" to which the truth lies on. The truth lies always beyond the grasps of the most damning evidence. I can't prove it, but I believe, or at least "I want to believe."