Über das Verhältnis von Glauben und Wissen

The essay takes a critical look at Jürgen Habermas' attempts to define the relationship between faith and knowledge in his Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie. Can the development of thinking from the mythical era through Jewish and Christian monotheism right up to the Enlightenment actually be understood as a cognitive learning process in which cognitive dissonances have prompted fresh impulses for insight? The antithesis is that faith and knowledge are two completely different epistemic approaches to reality that can both exist in the same person without being cognitively dissonant. Religion does not, as Habermas supposes, influence secular thinking in the way a »transmission« does, but through those who carry both within and, in the world without God, rationally argue for what is religiously open to them and is given for them to do.