The search for truth requires an open mind. It’s really not more complicated than that. The journey then proceeds largely by the process of elimination: we don’t really know what’s absolutely true, but we can rule out all the models and epistemologies that are inconsistent with what we observe. After this process, we’re still left with a bunch of questions; but the real upside is that we have far fewer wrong ideas, netting a clearer picture of reality.
The combination of applying the process of elimination to an open mind works rather efficiently. The problem is that very few people have a truly open mind. Instead, our journey is heavily thwarted, if not completely derailed, by cherished beliefs that we are not willing to let go of, or perhaps we have never heard an alternative to. Our brains desperately seek answers and are unsettled by the “unknown”. So we will try to envision the claims of our “worldview” as fitting together in a coherent whole, even when they have gaping conflicts with each other.
The logo for Rethinking Keller is a pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces that are jammed together, though they clearly don’t fit. Perhaps you’ve looked hard for a matching jigsaw puzzle piece, and when you finally found one that seemed like a candidate, you pushed a little harder to jam it into place, knowing all along that the right piece wouldn’t require any effort or uncertainty to fit into place. And we do the same with our belief systems that we do with our difficult jigsaw puzzles.
Ironically, we don’t realize how many pieces of our belief system we’ve jammed into place until we finally abandon them in favor of something else. Then we marvel at how long we were willing to tolerate the forced fit, because we were too fearful or lazy to consider alternatives. This logo will hopefully remind us of our tendency to endure dissonance, which is the first step in resolving it.