 Within the sphere of the “intellectual” – e.g., within scientific or historical scholarship – inquiry is conceived in terms of a process of “approximation” to reality. When it comes to religion, however, what matters, according to Kierkegaard, is not the “object to which the knower relates himself” but the relationship itself: the accent falls not on “what is said” but on “how it is said” (1846, 199 and 202). For Kierkegaard, as for the so-called evangelical fideists, faith is characterized by passionate commitment and thus requires a decision or “qualitative leap” (1846, 384). His claim is not simply that having evidence is unnecessary in this context, but that it would, so to speak, destroy the whole endeavor, since it would alter the meaning of the beliefs in question and the spirit in which they could be believed. “If I am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; but because I cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in faith, I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am ‘out on 70,000 fathoms of water’ and still have faith” (1846, 204). Any belief that depended on the outcome of historical or scientific approximation – and which could be undermined by its results – would not be genuine faith, and anything whose existence could be established purely on the basis of philosophical argument – and so could be believed in “indifferently,” without this belief making a significant difference in one’s life – would by definition not be God. “Anyone who wants to demonstrate the existence of God…proves something else instead, at times something that perhaps did not even need demonstrating, and in any case never anything better” (1844, 43).