Where do we draw the line between reason and mystery?

One of the interesting things I think we can observe by rationally inspecting existence is that it is essentially mysterious: in the most basic sense, none of us have any idea how we got here or where we go when we depart. We can also observe that to be completely logical, we have to acknowledge that reason must accept mystery as a phenomenon, since the mystery of existence is an essential aspect of reality that must be reckoned with if we are to be truly rational. This then irrevocably changes the realm of things to which reason may be applied. Reason tells us that mystery, because it is mystery, cannot be parsed, solved, computed, proven or otherwise processed; it must simply be recognized and acknowledged.

There are a number of different ways to handle this observation. You can just ignore it and expect everything to be knowable and provable. Or you can say that you can know mysterious things by faith independently from knowing them by reason, giving your faith a free pass into irrationality. Or you can just deal with things as they are, trying to draw the line between reason and mystery in just the right place, neither accepting things that can in fact be reasoned about, nor expecting reason to prove things it can’t.

Tags: faith and reason, mystery