Whenever a new idea is introduced that challenges the "conventional wisdom," the keepers of that "wisdom" (and their followers) dismiss it as the "hysterical ravings of a lunatic." It is quite understandable that people don't like to have their most cherished ideas challenged—people, that is, who have invested all their self-worth in what they think (or believe). But such people usually end up having to "eat humble pie" when the ideas of the "lunatic" are proved to be true.

Perhaps the most outstanding example of this is the experience of Christopher Columbus. When he proposed that the East could be reached by sailing West, people thought that was the stupidest idea they'd ever heard. And not just ordinary people. Columbus simply could not convince the power holders of his day to give him the financing he needed to get his hare-brained scheme off the ground—until, of course, he met up with Queen Isabella (certainly a woman ahead of her time). Still, people thought he was crazy. It was only when he returned from what he thought was India, laden with gold and tomatoes and other goodies, that those who called him a lunatic were forced to swallow the humble pie that was surely coming to them.

One thinks also of Copernicus and Galileo. Many great minds of the time—including popes and cardinals—thought that these two men (and others, such a Giordano Bruno) were "all wet" about the Earth moving around the Sun. In fact, according to Jerzy Dobrzycki (in The Reception of Copernicus' Heliocentric Theory), Copernicus was actually called a "lunatic throwing everything into confusion." As for poor Galileo, he was forced to recant what he had written in his book, The Starry Messenger, on pain of death. It took the Catholic Church 400 years to eat its share of humble pie when, in 1992, John Paul II finally exonerated Galileo.

Examples could be multiplied—Einstein was (and still is) often portrayed as the "Mad Scientist," G. K. Chesterton considered Nietzsche to be mad, and so on—but the point is clear: Yesterday's lunacy often becomes today's truth. What was nonsense yesterday makes sense today. How is this possible?

Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), introduced the concept of the "paradigm shift" to explain how scientific revolutions take place. The concept has come to be applied more widely, even outside the realm of science, and we might use it here to our advantage to explain how something that once was "illogical" can come to be accepted as the truth. A paradigm is a set of assumptions that one uses to judge the world and the things and ideas in it. Based on these assumptions, ideas either make sense or are "illogical." But once this set of assumptions changes or we apply a different set of assumptions (that is, when we shift paradigms), then suddenly what was "illogical" makes sense, since we are not judging it by our old assumptions, but by new ones.