Some things can only be known by what they aren’t. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the traditional wisdom that God can only be described by what He is not.¹ 

In one of life’s maddeningly common searches for lost items, the ordeal consists of a string of successive negations, or “nots.” The searching process is defined by a series of determinations of where the object in question is not. In every place one looks where the item turns out not to be, something positive can be concluded from the negative: “this is another place where what I seek is not.”

In that light, the process of searching isn’t purely defeating. But I feel a keen disappointment sometimes—even a disillusionment—whenever I discover that what I sought isn’t somewhere I really thought it would be. Illogical though it is, if there were a place I strongly suspected to find my quarry, I might look there again even after nothing turned up the first time.

But the fact remains unchanged: if what you need isn’t there, it isn’t there. 

Either/And Either/Or

There’s something about the staggering multiplicity of the world’s belief systems that bothers me. And it’s not some self-righteous conviction that so many people could align with a faith other than my own.

What bothers me follows from the fact that fundamentally distinct and exclusive truth claims cannot be simultaneously true. I cannot both be sitting in my chair and standing beside my chair at the same time; the law of non-contradiction seems reasonably necessary.

Worldviews that make differing, absolute claims about the fundamental nature of reality cannot both be describing truth. Contra the old analogy, even though blind men feeling an elephant may both be describing the same creature when one says it is sturdy like a tree (the elephant’s leg) and the other insists it is bendy like a snake (it’s trunk), they wouldn’t both be correct if one said the creature was an elephant while the other concluded it really was a snake. 

Truth has this kind of exclusivity by nature; I don’t relish in all the implications of that fact. Like desperately searching for a lost item in a place one dearly expected to find it, only to discover it truly is not there, there is a disillusionment in the experience. Indeed, to be found wrong in my belief about what I seek may have me incredulously returning to examine the same claim, again and again. 

No matter how deeply I look, it won’t change the fact that what I need is somewhere else. My car keys cannot both be in the silverware drawer and on the record player at the same time. 

The Last Place You Look

Yet it strikes me that this isn’t the most devastating way that I could err in a fruitless search. 

True, I will know one kind of disappointment in the search for my keys upon finding only eating utensils in that drawer and not what I need to drive my car.

But I would have suffered a much more concerning defeat if, upon sliding open the drawer, I rejoiced in triumph, “Look, my keys!” while holding up a handful of forks. 

When my search doesn’t reveal what I need, what I need hasn’t changed. As long as I realize that what I have found so far in my search is only another place where what I still need is not, then it hasn’t been in vain.

If my search continues after each “fruitless” hiding place is uncovered and I keep looking in fresh places for the same thing, I haven’t lost. Disappointed though I may be, I haven’t become a tragedy of belief: I am not walking to my driveway, fork in hand, expecting to go for a ride. 

I still know what a key is, that a key is what I need, and that nothing I’ve encountered yet has been my Key.

Disillusioned though I may feel at discovering yet another place where what I desired most turned out not to be, I must not see it all as loss. I have learned yet another very real truth about the One I seek:

I know one more place where that One is not. 

1. Thomas Aquinas states in Summa Theologiae I 3, “We cannot know what God is, only what he is not. We must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist rather than the ways in which he does.” ↩︎