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Oh my lord, why is Jesus in that list?

because it's actually quite relevant. The quality that the author is talking about is simply faith. Genuine intellectual activity is the recognition that there is a gap between how you understand the world and that there is is a more genuine degree of understanding to be found.

Because there's no guarantee of success the attitude one needs to adopt is the same attitude a believer needs to have, which is to take a leap of faith.

And like genuine faith, genuine intellectual activity is not goal oriented. If you only think to optimise your shopping list or make more money, you're impoverishing your own thinking by making it subject to what basically amounts some meaningless goal, that is to say you're instrumentalising thinking. Just like being faithful so you end up on God's or the churches good side is an impoverished version of belief.

The OP goes into some detail on the essentialness of honesty and integrity when it comes to inquiry. Without both, your pursuit of deep understanding will short-circuit. The best way I know to overlook truth is to willfully presume you know something, especially something unknowable. And that's faith. To exercise faith, you must stop questioning, shut your eyes, and jump into the abyss. You stop thinking. If some sort of understanding arises from faith, it most certainly is not the fruit of intellectual pursuit.

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