G. K. Chesterton argues in his book Orthodoxy that sanity—the ability to reckon with the world and life as it truly is—is not possible without believing in mystery. Those who limit themselves to believing only what can be seen and analyzed by human observation are not the most balanced and informed among us; rather, they are the blindest and most irrational.

He illumines this point by drawing an analogy with the sun and moon:

The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism [belief in mystery] explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. . . .

But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. (pp. 17-18, paragraphing added)

As Christians, we must embrace mystery. The Bible calls us to believe that God is one and yet exists as three persons, that Jesus Christ was and is simultaneously 100% human and 100% divine, that God is completely sovereign yet men are still accountable for their sins, that a good God created a world in which evil exists, etc., etc.

To believe these mysteries does not mean that we reject or avoid reason and scientific methods. No, we use them as long and as far as they will take us. But we recognize their limitations, and in the end we always surrender ourselves and our findings to the highest and truest authority—the Word of God.