The Search For Truth Is Like Putting Together One Big Jigsaw Puzzle

"It was rather like the preparations made to put a large, complicated jigsaw puzzle together. One begins by sorting the pieces by color into piles. At the same time, if one comes across those which are clearly the “border” pieces, one then puts them in an altogether different pile. Once in awhile, while sorting, serendipity brings two pieces together, and those are put in little “sub-piles.

After this process is completed, it is done again in a more refined and exact way.

However, the Grail Problem is not so easy. It is like having the puzzle, only someone has hidden half or more of the pieces. Not only are we going to have difficulty getting a full outline, even if we DO assemble the pieces we have accurately, we may not be able to determine what the picture truly portrays. Add to this the fact that someone may come into the room and drop pieces into your pile that do not even belong to the puzzle!

Yes, it is that bad, if not worse...

[...] Skepticism, the ability not to be fooled, is important. But skepticism can be “cheap.” It is easy to disbelieve everything, and some scholars seem to take this approach. A better approach is to embrace ideas, to consider nothing absurd, and spend the necessary time to examine it closely and minutely. If you throw away puzzle pieces indiscriminately, you may never complete the puzzle!

But, when you find the flaw, even a small one, if it is solidly established as a flaw, you must be prepared to ruthlessly kill the idea and move to another.

So, with each little pile of puzzle pieces, one takes up a likely starting piece and attempts to fit the others to it one by one. But, as I noted, it may be so that the “starting piece” has been tossed into the pile to lead one astray, and will NEVER fit anything! And it may take a long time to realize this. Many people never realize it. They trim the piece, they trim other pieces, they force and maneuver to make them fit! And then, of course, having done this, other pieces are found that do, actually, fit, and they crow with delight that they have solved the puzzle never realizing that the “keystone” will have caused all the adjacent pieces to come together around a false center, thus the primary object has been missed… and the REAL centerpiece will be tossed aside as irrelevant.

~ The Terror of History (LKJ)

*******
"Francis Bacon said that what a man would like to be true, he preferentially believes. That's a mistake I try to avoid." ~ Chet Raymo.

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." ~ Morpheus.