To a certain extent, our intellectual lives resemble Jonah's experience in the belly of a great fish. We find ourselves in a kind of intellectual darkness as we are unable to discern the true character of ourselves and our world. People around us tend to oversimplify complex matters and rush to surface level characterizations of social and political issues, Christian scripture, and natural phenomena. Fortunately, we can effectively resist the pull of this human tendency. We can adopt the following epistemological axiom which may serve as our intellectual guide: The possession of grey matter, the ability to opine, participation in a mere volley of assertions, and so on, are unlikely to enable the discovery of truth. With the help of this axiom, we can ultimately see that there is a stark difference between opining and discovering. Formulating and expressing opinion or primarily deploying the indicative mood, and similar forms of communicative behavior, will not reveal the true character of the things we encounter in the natural world, in scripture, and elsewhere. To discover the true character of the things we encounter, we will need to become proficient in the art of "unpuzzling." This book primarily seeks to convey the following message: If we "unpuzzle" the perplexing phenomena we encounter, we may find a way out of the belly of mere conjecture and repartee.
