“The essence of the totalitarian mentality, whether it is religious or political, is the false promise of a system of all-explaining consistency: a worldview that accounts for everything and answers all questions. Some of us, by contrast, expect our views to be contradictory or at least to contain contradiction, and welcome the opportunity for further reflection and experiment this affords.”
–Christopher Hitchens, foreword to Choice: The Best of Reason. See now, I think this gets things exactly backwards. If you think your worldview should be consistent, you have much more reason to try to figure out the places where it appears to be contradictory. You have much more thinking and exploring to do than the person who accepts contradiction and can therefore relax and say, “Hey, I’m large, dude, I contain multitudes. What’s for lunch?”

I do think there are questions that aren’t meant to be answered so much as lived through, accepted, or entered into: questions that are really mysteries. The sort of thing Thomas Aquinas meant when he said, “I have seen things that make all my writings as straw.” But those mysteries are precisely the place where “experiment” ends and “reflection” begins to look very unlike ordinary point-by-point reasoning.