Theism vs. Atheism ... will it ever be settled?

Because the story is a fiction specifically written to make a point, it's not something we can really rip apart for it's logic, or change to make a different point - the monks cannot be partially sighted, there really is an elephant in the room. It doesn't mean that the story is true, or valid - I don't need to point out that the story told by a religious person to convey a specific message.

 

In the "atheist" version it could be that the room contains a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan and a rope and the six monks all conclude that it was an elephant.

Negoba wrote: I actually first visualized this in a slightly different way...   The truth is like the sun, an enormous ball of extremely bright light. Each person gets a little window to look in upon it. We're all looking at the same thing, but from different angles. Each angle will have similarities and differences. Some will seem quite different, depending on the distance of the windows from each other.

Well, staring at the sun is a sure fire way of going blind, (if anyone ever needed proof of evolution...). The geometry of this analogy gives me a physical issue that I can't get passed and the helio astronomy causes me problems too, but I get the point you are making. The problem there is again in the supposition that the truth is bigger than anything we can hope to contain within our limited intellect [there is an elephant in the room] - I have a different view - the truth is more likely to be simple and elegant, (not in an Occam sense, there is nothing inherently true about Occam's Razor), because everything we have discovered so far has been simple and elegant, even if proof of those discoveries has been extremely complex [there isn't an elephant in the room]. To paraphrase your analogy, the truth is the fusion of hydrogen into helium that makes the sun burn extremely bright, not in the whole photosphere itself, which is simply a manifestation of that fusion process; each window sees the same process and is staring at the truth but cannot recognise it for what it is, so invent different explanations for what they are seeing. (Which why the different world religions had different interpretations of what the sun was, how it came to be and how it moves across the sky (so to speak)).

 

Negoba wrote:   This was before I knew there was an ancient proverb that said virtually the same thing.       I'm fairly confident there is an elephant in the room. But it may be a very different creature than anything I imagine.

Edited by Dean - August 30 2010 at 18:18

 

Men discovered this gods were false, because there was not a direct manifestation of them to men, unlike what we feel and have experienced (directly or indirectly).

 

Iván

There is nothing to say that the feelings that religious people experience are direct manifestations, or that believers of old gods didn't have the same feelings and experiences.

I believe that the beautiful and simple principle makes the elephant exist simultaneously with its components. 

Duality, difference allows for the grand multitude of manifestation. But all duality is transient.

The one and the many are the two halves of the Tao.