Faith or Feeling? Why Truth Requires Logic, Not Just Emotion

In the past, before I merited to return to a life of faith, I approached various religious figures to ask what their beliefs were based on. Very quickly, the conversations shifted away from logic and reason into the realm of emotion and personal experience.

For example, priests told me about their emotional connection to the sound of the organ and the singing in churches. I found myself rejecting this kind of explanation, precisely because I had heard the same thing from so many different religious figures during my search.

I once told a priest: I am familiar with the spiritual feeling you are describing, because I have experienced it myself during deep prayer. What you are describing is a sense of surrender, of nullifying the self before a loving and all powerful being, an infinite presence beyond all measure. It is the feeling of being seen, known, and loved by something far greater than you. There is no doubt that a human being has a spiritual soul, and that it is capable of perceiving God. This is one of our spiritual capacities. But that spiritual experience does not, in any way, prove the truth of a crucified idol, Buddha, or any other belief system.

To illustrate, the feeling of love is a powerful and profound emotion. Yet it does not prove that the object of that love is worthy of it, or that it loves you in return. In the same way, a spiritual feeling alone cannot establish the truth of a religion.

It may sound surprising, but at one point I was contacted by a spokesman for a group in Tel Aviv who was convinced that extraterrestrials communicate with human beings. When he failed to support his claims with rational arguments, he invited me to attend a gathering where members of his group meditate in order to feel the telepathic love of these beings. I declined, understanding that spiritual emotions can easily mislead a person into believing ideas that are false or even completely irrational. This is how people come to believe in idols, statues, deified gurus, or even alien signals.

Why Truth Requires the Intellect

At that point, I realized that truth must be found through a different tool, one that is consistent and shared by all people: the intellect. Only through reason can a person refute false or baseless ideas and arrive at a clear understanding of reality, one that does not depend on shifting personal feelings.

Through this process, I discovered that Judaism is like a treasure of gold hidden among piles of straw. It is unique among religions in that it is grounded in strong, rational arguments: the wisdom of creation that points to a Creator, the national revelation at Mount Sinai witnessed by an entire people, prophecies on a global scale that have been fulfilled over thousands of years, and more.

This is why the Torah states: “You shall know today and bring it to your heart that the Lord is God” (Devarim 4:39). This verse teaches that intellectual understanding must come before emotional belief. It does not dismiss emotion, but it establishes the proper order. First comes knowledge, and only afterward should that truth be internalized within the heart and soul.

This is the distinction between a true teaching and false prophets.