In in attempt to reply to Éa’s examining questions on Friday night that were essentially restatements of the problem of religious pluralism which came after she returned from a school field trip to Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, and Jain temples in Pittsburgh, I stumbled into what I now take as a highly satisfactory answer: Think of how various people would describe me. Carla would describe me one way. Sullivan would describe me another way. You would describe me still another. A stranger on the street looking at me for the first time would describe me still a fourth way. And so on. In fact, everyone would describe me at least a little bit differently. The various takes on me would be accurate in part but inaccurate in others. Descriptive patterns and similarities would be evident, but never total. And a person who had never seen me wouldn’t really be able to describe me at all—nor even be able to say with any confidence that I exist. (Here we bump up against the problem of divine hiddenness, but that’s a different problem.)
Sure, I’ve recreated Hick’s elephant. But putting it in personal, rather than pachydermal, terms helps me embrace it more readily and thus be more at ease in our increasingly pluralistic world. So does explicitly allowing—no, stating as a sound prediction—that people in my illustration will obviously be wrong about me in some of the ways they describe me—even the people closest to me like Carla and Éa and Sullivan. That much is obvious when talking in terms of people. How much more so when talking about the invisible God?