Recently I heard someone object to the idea that we can know anything at all by saying, “How do you know the universe wasn’t created five minutes ago?”

I responded: “What in the world do you mean? Why think that?”

“Well, it could be true, and you can’t prove that it isn’t true.”

Perhaps you have heard someone make a similarly grandiose claim. There are many different kinds of unsupportable, evidence-free assertions that purport to discourage us from thinking we have knowledge of the world (“we are all brains in a vat,” and so forth).

Interestingly, the humanist Bertrand Russell originally proposed The Five Minute Hypothesis. As he put it:

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The disappointing gospel is a very real problem.

I’m not talking about the gospel itself, but the gospel that becomes disappointing because of how we present it. The disappointing gospel is one of the worst messages in the world because it so abuses the very best message in the world.

The disappointing gospel sounds like this:

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The parable of the blind men and the elephant “has crossed between many religious traditions and is part of Jain, Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu lore.” One version goes like this:

“A number of blind men came to an elephant. Somebody told them that it was an elephant. The blind men asked, ‘What is the elephant like?’ and they began to touch its body. One of them said: ‘It is like a pillar.’ This blind man had only touched its leg. Another man said, ‘The elephant is like a husking basket.’ This person had only touched its ears. Similarly, he who touched its trunk or its belly talked of it differently. In the same way, he who has seen the Lord in a particular way limits the Lord to that alone and thinks that He is nothing else.”

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