“Postmodernistslike to use the well-known illustration of blind men describing an elephant to show that reason has a fatal weakness. As you may remember, the blind man who felt only the elephant’s tail reasoned that elephants were like ropes. The one who felt only its side claimed they were like walls. The one who touched its legs insisted that elephants were like trees. Each man established a premise and formed a conclusion based on the evidence at hand, but the individual conclusions did not give the men the full truth about elephants. According to postmodernists. this story shows that reason is not a dependable tool for apprehending truth.

But the failure of the blind men was not a failure of reason; it was a failure of reasoning. What the men postulated about elephants would have been true enough had their claims been more modest. The elephant’s tail – not the enire elephant – is like a rope, its side is like a wall, and its legs are like trees. Each man described the limited part of reality that he encountered accurately enough. Their mistake was in drawing conclusions too broad to be supported by such limited data. Each tried to infer the enitre elephant from an insufficent sampling of evidence. The men applied reason poorly and got poor results.”

— from the book “In Search of Certainity” by Josh McDowell and Thomas Williams. Tyndale House Publishing 2003. pages 32-33