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WHY does the Quran never refer to the human brain? Even when it speaks of understanding and comprehension, it points towards the human heart (the qalb) as the seat of those activities. For those who doubt that religion can ever be intellectually convincing, this feature is good evidence for their position that faith ultimately involves a ‘blind’ leap into the realm of feelings and emotions. In other words, for them, faith involves an abandonment of logical rationality.
But that is not quite what the Christian philosopher Kierkegaard meant when he famously remarked, “Where reason is exhausted, faith begins”. What Kierkegaard was trying to say was that in the search for truth and wisdom, reasoning and logic can only take us so far. When the seeker of knowledge is returned dissatisfied from every avenue of reason he has pursued, his search for certain knowledge ultimately thrusts his soul into the depths of faith.
However, this leap of faith isn’t actually “blind” or “irrational” as some make it out to be. While it is true that faith involves an overcoming of reason, this overcoming is actually guided by another faculty of the intellect: intuition.
Carl Jung was once asked whether he believed in God as a child, to which he replied in the affirmative. He was then asked whether he still believed in the same way. He paused and, after a moment of introspection, replied: “I know. I needn’t believe. I know.” Jung was referring to a kind of knowledge deeper than the kind we acquire through the rational activity of our logical mind: knowledge by intuition.
Faith, guided by intuition, is not blind.
So what exactly is this intuitive knowledge? To begin with, it cannot be equated with emotions. Where an emotion is fleeting, an intuition is lasting. While extreme emotion involves a suspension of reason, great intuition complements it and completes its activity. Emotions are neither truly cognitive nor truly transformative. An intuition, on the other hand, calls us towards a truth and compels us to live by it.
The seat of intuition is the human heart, the innermost recess of our consciousness, a part of ourselves that always eludes the grasp of scientific attempts to explain it. Intuitive knowledge comes from within ourselves. But it never originates there. It is always received –– as if from a heavenly gateway inside us.
Even though intuition gets a bad name for being ‘irrational’, it is in fact the anchor of the mind’s rational activity. Rationality depends on intuition and, thus, always remains limited in its scope. In order for us to engage in rational thinking, we have to first ensure that our faculty of thinking is a reliable means of accessing true knowledge. This, we cannot rationally prove. For any attempt to prove the reliability of rationality will employ the same rationality whose reliability we would be trying to prove. The circularity of the problem is inescapable.
For any rational thinking to get off the ground, there has to be an initial presumption that the human faculty that makes such thinking possible is trustworthy. This presumption –– this basic intuition –– is, at best, a leap of faith. That does not make it untrue. Intuition is no less reliable than reason. In fact, it tends to furnish knowledge of a degree of certainty that is beyond the reach of reason.
Consider another basic intuition: our knowledge of our own existence. We cannot prove ourselves to ourselves because the thing being proved would be doing the proving. But we know that we exist because we intuit our own existence. It is not the kind of knowledge that is open to the possibility of doubt.
So, if basic intuitions are found in the very beginning of logical rationality as its grounding anchors, why should we become so sceptical of intuition when it moves from basic truths to higher-order truths of a spiritual and metaphysical kind? After all, we know our thinking to be reliable and we know that we exist in much the same way that Jung claimed to know God’s being. Basic intuitions and spiritual intuitions differ in their order of magnitude, but belong to the same category of knowledge and arise from the same faculty of the intellect.
A holistic view of the intellect, in which there is a place for both rationality and intuition, can help us understand that faith, guided by intuition, is not really blind. True blindness is the denial of intuition as a necessary intellectual faculty and an inescapable mode of attaining knowledge.
Kierkegaard, therefore, was merely describing his own journey, in which logical reason, having ventured forth on its own, ultimately returned –– exhausted and defeated –– to the same ‘blind’ heart where its journey had first begun. The hand of intuition, having first aided reason, finally sustains the individual when reason can no longer bear his weight.
The writer studies law at Oxford.
Published in Dawn, January 2nd, 2026
