Have you ever heard the parable of the elephant and the six blindfolded men?

It goes like this: Once upon a time, there were six blindfolded men standing around an elephant, each grabbing at it, and each arguing with the others over what it was that they were touching. One said it was like a rope, another that it was a tree trunk, another like a leather bag, another a spear, and so on with the others. By this time it is clear that the elephant represents “ultimate truth,” or perhaps even God. And the moral of the story is that each world religion has a “part of the elephant,” but not the whole. That explains why no one can name the whole and so forth. 

There is just one little problem with this story. How did any of us come to know that it is in fact an elephant? For that matter, how did we come to find that there were six blindfolded men there? The answer is that it took a seventh onlooker—an onlooker who was not blindfolded—in order to see the whole.

In short, the story teller is cheating. We will also notice that in addition to being self-defeating, such a position is self-deifying. That is, before we come to see it contradicting itself, while it goes on telling its story, the one telling it reserves to himself the total vision that he denies to everyone else.

Although the word “agnostic” seems to have emerged with T. H. Huxley, the philosophical impetus for it came in the movement from David Hume to Immanuel Kant. The word ‘agnostic’ comes from two Greek words: 1. a (no) and 2. gnosis (knowledge). To be agnostic, then, is to claim no knowledge. But there is what we might call a “soft agnosticism” and a “hard agnosticism,” the former of which is only a personal or individual agnostic stance. Here one simply says, “I do not know.” However, that is not usually what is meant by the term. Generally speaking, agnosticism is of the harder variety. It claims that no one knows and no one can know. And it may seem to come in many forms, but there is one ultimate essence of it.

The Logic of Agnosticism Set Forth

There is a basic unifying logic to any form of agnosticism. This essential form is a violation of the most basic law of logic. Let us recall the expansion of the brackets from terms to whole propositions—e.g., “square-circles,” “married bachelors,” and “This piece of chalk is not a piece of chalk.”

Will the situation be fundamentally different when our subject and predicate terms have the same meaning, using only different words? Not at all. We understand the concept of synonymous meaning. With that in mind, let us consider the following five propositions.

1. The Supernatural cannot be known.

2. The finite cannot contain the infinite.

3. God is too big of a concept.

4. Truth is relative.

5. Reality is an illusion. 

If we were to convert these to acceptable forms of categorical statements for the purposes of logic, each subject term would have to be modified by the quantifier “All.” That is because the statements are claiming that the very idea, by definition, has the predicate in question. Quantifiers are either all, no, or some. Qualifiers are either is or is not, or else are or are not for the plural. Each term (subject and predicate) also has to be a noun.

1. All supernature is an unknowable nature.

2. All infinity is a finite-uncontainable thing.

3. All God is an inconceivably-big thing.

4. All truth is a relative perspective.

5. All reality is an illusion. 

Now we have already seen that “absolute illusion” is impossible because it requires a contrast—a backdrop, you might say—to reality. Grouping these all together, however, we might notice what all five of these statements have in common. Obviously they are all denying our ability to know the object in question: whether Supernature, infinity, God, truth, or even reality.

What might be less obvious, perhaps because it is so basic to our language, is that each one of them is a categorical statement: each featuring a subject and a predicate. Now as we all know, the subject of a sentence is what a sentence is about, and the predicate is what is true about the subject. Not everything of course. But every predicate is saying at least one true thing about its subject. The other thing that makes this more difficult to see is that the synonymous meaning cannot be seen on the surface of subject and predicate terms. The contradictory predicate terms are actually concealed in the copula (that is—either the being verb that connects subject and predicate, or the action verb, which is not proper logical translation anyway): e.g., 1. “cannot be”; 2. “cannot contain”; 3. “is”; 4. “is”; and 5. “is”.

However, we must ask: Is not the agnostic position precisely that we can know nothing about something (whether about Supernature, infinity, God, or truth)? Agnosticism means no knowledge—not some, not any! To “know nothing” is to the same as to “know not-one-thing.” If I can know even one thing in x class, do I really know no-thing about x? Clearly not. And yet if anyone will examine those five sentences, each of them predicate one thing to their subject. In fact the whole argument depends upon those predicates.

“God is too big of a concept.” Too big, you say? But what is this “big-ness” you speak of? Is it no-thing or one-thing? What about infinity to a finite mind? What kind of a thing is infinity that makes it the kind of a thing that we cannot know even one thing about? Hopefully we are starting to see the trouble. I think someone has tried to smuggle an elephant and some blindfolds back into the room. Now that basic law of logic I was referring to is the law of noncontradiction (A ≠ ~A). In layman’s terms: “A cannot be both A and non-A at the same time and in the same relation.” Applied to these four expressions of agnosticism, we cannot say of our subject (God) that we both know one thing (A) and not-one-thing (~A), at the same time and in the same relation. In other words, whatever species of agnosticism one wants to use, the expression will be a violation of the law of noncontradiction. That eliminates agnosticism from the options of anyone who wants to have a rational worldview.

A Makeover for Hume’s Elephant

Agnosticism appeared to have been revived, or at least gotten a facelift in the position of A. J. Ayer called acognosticism. Previously, it had been recognized that Hume’s standard for meaningful statements had violated itself. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), he had said,

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Hume’s statement here is neither purely analytical nor purely empirical—no statement about matters of fact are—and therefore collapses in on itself as surely as our square-circles. By the mid-twentieth century, such lessons had been unlearned, and positivist and language-analyst “philosophers” were busy repeating a mantra to whoever was bored enough to listen, that to speak about God was “not even false,” in that it was not an empirical reality, and thus not a matter of fact. It could not even rise to the level of rational discourse.

Ayer argued that “God-talk” contained no objective meaning. It was obviously not about an empirical being; but it was also claiming to be “a being,” which could only be empirical. In other words, Ayer took it for granted that to be is to be material.

Thus one could not even be agnostic. We are without even cognition (a-cog-nostic) of the meaning behind the terms.

The observant philosopher would have realized that Ayer was simply repackaging Hume’s self-defeating criteria in the language of terms instead of whole propositions. He was literally shrinking it, so that it required something of a mental microscope to see the same nonsense in a smaller unit.

Such an observant philosopher would also note that Ayer and his generation of “philosophers” were also begging the question about being and knowledge. Whether material beings were the only beings, and whether empirical testing was the only path to objective knowledge, cannot be settled by assuming it up front. They simply considered it settled—yet another begging of the question.

Having said this, coming to the realization that a denial of the possibility of any knowledge is illogical, does not prove that there is any knowledge of this or that thing. Demolition work is one thing. Building a new foundation is another. What we have at least done is to show agnosticism dead on arrival after a quick test of logic.

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1. cf. T. H. Huxley, “Agnosticism and Christianity,” in Collected Essays, Volume V (London: 1894).

2. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 1946).

3. David Hume, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1977), 114.