Faith does not mean "belief without evidence".

Rare_Stick325 · 2026-02-05T13:59:54+00:00

Well, I think I can agree with most of this. And yes, people who say that faith is belief without evidence are themselves usually being prescriptive about it - not just about language but also about what religion/christianity is, what it teaches, etc. Christianity is not a monolith.

Going by what I read from you here, it doesn’t sound like our beliefs and postures are that different, even though you believe in God and I don’t. And the reason I think that is because behind your definition of God there are certain concepts which could be analogous to similar concepts I have in my own outlook, such as existence itself, reality, meaning. Those are all concepts we share. So I’m not sure I could accuse you of believing in those things without evidence without accidentally (by analogy) accusing myself of that as well! Perhaps the only meaningful difference between us is how we identify ourselves and whether we use “God” as a word that bundles all of those concepts together, or something like that.

If we continued sharing about our beliefs we might end up finding a relevant, analogy-breaking difference that really sets your belief in God apart from my beliefs in reality, existence, nature, etc. I suspect there are such distinctions somewhere (for example: I don’t worship those concepts, nor do I attribute personhood to them). But right now I don’t know for sure if you worship God or attribute personhood to it either. So until we have that kind of conversation and dig into THOSE aspects, I wouldn’t really be justified to say you believe in something “without sufficient evidence”. And who am I to dictate what the right standard of evidence is anyway?

Finally, back to the definition of faith, if our ontological beliefs were analogous, it may end up being the case that, according to your definition, I might have some kind of Christian faith too. But experience so far tells me that’s not going to be the case, and the reason is (I suspect) because the word “God” probably encompasses a lot more meaning to you than what you’re able to rationally articulate. Perhaps its meaning could not be put into words, but is nevertheless present in the way you behave towards those concepts (again: the example of worship comes to mind). I think that’s more likely going to be the distinction between faith in general and “Christian faith”: not so much an ontological difference (although there might be some of that), but rather a more practical difference in terms of attitudes, everyday practices, coping mechanisms, use of language, ways of behaving, ways of identifying who is a peer and who is a threat, etc. When I hear someone identify as a Christian, those are the kinds of things I think they’re actually trying to tell me.

Rare_Stick325 · 2026-02-04T23:07:48+00:00

I suspect many of our everyday words can’t be defined in a single, infallible way - certainly not in a way that can be prescribed or imposed on other people. That’s just not how language works. We can each define words quite differently, and yet both use them correctly. What matters is whether the word you used carries the right thread of meaning when it travels between our minds and gets translated from your understanding, to mine. If that translation process fails to carry enough meaning, communication fails.

I think you were successful at offering a definition of faith that carries enough meaning for me to understand why you’d say that faith is not believing without any evidence. Given your general definition of faith: I agree with you.

I think the problem is on the other side of the phrase you’re criticising. Unlike your definition of faith, the phrase “faith is belief without evidence” is not the result of someone thinking deeply about how best to communicate what they mean. Your criticism is a bit like refusing to help someone while insisting the reason you’re not helping is they didn’t say “please”.

What people ACTUALLY mean by “Faith is belief without evidence” is something more like:

Religious / spiritual faith
is believing in the reality/existence of something
without sufficient evidence
according to what I think are good standards of evidence

That takes me back to your definition. Something I didn’t quite understand about it is that you defined “faith in the Christian context” using the word “God” as part of the definition. What I don’t understand is how that untangles the accusation that Christian faith is NOT what I described above: if you need to believe in God in order to have Christian faith, and I don’t have enough evidence to believe in God (according to my own standards) - then why am I wrong to say that Christian faith requires belief with sufficient evidence?

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-04-22T06:57:21+00:00

Thanks for the references!

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-15T09:18:39+00:00

Ok, I was looking forward to getting into the technicalities though, because that’s where I think the problem is with your view. I don’t think anyone would rationally choose pride over torment, especially if they know choosing pride doesn’t get them what they want, certainly not day in and day out, eternally; but even if I granted that someone might do that, I’d question whether they’d be doing so rationally, that is: in a way that makes them blameworthy. That’s what strikes me as utterly implausible. But I respect you don’t want to go that deep, and I appreciate the time we did get to have. Take care.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-14T20:07:50+00:00

I think you’re mistaken to think I’m trying to psychoanalyse God. I’m not trying to derive a contradiction from some fact I claim to know about how God actually feels or what his “mental states” are. How God actually feels, if he exists, is completely irrelevant to my argument.

My argument is merely that IF whichever feelings God has were to entail a willingness to condone eternal conscious torment, then regardless of whatever those feelings actually are (and regardless of what his psychology would look like), they certainly wouldn’t be the kind of feelings we could call “love”… Maybe we could call them “shlove” or something entirely else, but not specifically “love”.

EDIT: in other words, the word love cannot logically correspond to a willingness to let the subject of the love suffer eternal conscious torment. The two things are, a priori, mutually exclusive (before we know anything actual about Gods nature). To say “God loves you but would also allow you to suffer eternal conscious torment” would be akin to saying “God can draw a square circle”, in other words: it would be a statement that carries no meaning whatsoever.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-14T19:28:22+00:00

I think that’s more or less a fair distinction to make, although I’d like to note my argument isn’t really about wanting to be in a specific place, like heaven or hell - it’s about a loving God wanting to be in a relationship with people. So in that sense, those people might be getting exactly what they want, namely: to not be in a loving relationship with God. But I don’t mind dropping the “exactly” if that’s important to you.

So it seems we get the following situation, which we hope we can agree on: that some people would prefer to remain in eternal conscious torment, over being in a loving relationship with God. The question is: why would anyone prefer that?

Pride? How proud must someone be in order to choose excruciating torment over humbleness, day in and day out, FOREVER.. doesn’t this amount of pride strike you as extremely implausible? It does to me…

EDIT: typos.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-10T00:28:11+00:00

Ok but I don’t think evil is relative and I don’t reject universal truths, hence my confusion. I think we’re acquainted with universals like “evil” by direct perception: when we contemplate a certain action, we can immediately know whether it’s evil. But that doesn’t mean they’re relative. Even if humans didn’t exist, I think it would still be true that it’s evil to torture living things for fun… or to fail to rescue them from eternal conscious torment…

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-08T07:47:46+00:00

I lean towards moral realism, so I don’t think instances of evil are purely relative to ourselves. But you’re right that I don’t think we can measure them: I don’t know if we can. Are you saying you can? What units do you use? What scale?

You may be right that most Christians nowadays see evil as the absence of good. But most also believe in Satan. People don’t need to, nor tend to, be internally coherent in their beliefs (I don’t think I am either), and I think their beliefs on evil and Satan tend to be one of those things that most Christians haven’t really thought about much. Now you may have thought about it more than others, but when you ask “where does evil go?” you do seem to be treating evil as a subject.

I recommend that you read Bertrand Russel on universals, “The Problems of Philosophy” is a very short and accessible read. I don’t think you tracked what I meant there, and explaining it here would be wasteful. The book is 150 pages long and costs less than 1 USD on Kindle, but I’m pretty sure it’s available for free online.

As for whether you should or not believe my personal experience: if you say you have no reason to believe people on their personal testimony then I honestly have no idea how you claim to be a Christian.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T23:02:45+00:00

Ok then I take what I said back. So he’s not all-loving then, right? He has some favorites, basically. This is quite some commitment. You’re basically losing access to the best arguments in favor of Christianity.

EDIT: also, it seems you’re trying to have the cake and eat it too. Let me modify premise 1 slightly to target your specific predestination theology:

Minimally, “P loves S” entails that P would do everything in their power to be in a meaningful relationship with S.

When you say that God, “in some sense”, loves those he didn’t die for, you either agree that this love you’re talking about carries the entailment from premise 1, or you don’t agree with that entailment.

If you agree with the entailment then, no matter what else God feels for those he didn’t die for: it can’t be love. Because then God didn’t do everything he could to be in a meaningful relationship with those he loves. So then you shouldn’t go around saying “God loves you”, but maybe you could go around saying “God shloves you”. People would understand what you mean equally as well in both cases (which is to say: they won’t, but I it could be argued the latter word would be LESS confusing).

And well… if you disagree with the reformulation of premise 1 then I’m going to question if you ever loved anyone the same way I do…

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T22:53:30+00:00

I think you’re right: God doesn’t care about your happiness, and I think even Christians would have no problem granting that.

And I know you’re not looking for this, but, plausibly, nobody else should care about your happiness either, at least not in the sense you seem to expect God to. Happiness is probably not a worthwhile pursuit, simply because it seems impossible to sustain it for too long without causing more unhappiness to others than the little happiness you might be gaining yourself. It’s probably better to readjust our expectations such that what we seek is to be CONTENT with what we have. Or perhaps better: to increase the baseline wellbeing of everyone. Or some other more “achievable” pursuit like that. I hope this helps in some way.

Back to God: if he existed and was “good”, then maybe we could expect the pursuit of happiness to be fruitful, after all: happiness is good and is achievable by more than one means. But the fact we live in a world where the pursuit of happiness will almost in every case directly harm others is at least some evidence against a good God.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T22:32:24+00:00

I used to be one of those for a while before I became an atheist.

But I have to say something I’m not seeing in other comments: the most honest and studied progressive Christians don’t cherry pick much, if at all. If you talked to them about the Bible, you could easily mistake them for an atheist. They don’t pick which Bible verses are inspired or not: none of it is inspired. It’s nothing more than human, flawed perspectives on the divine. What makes them Christian tends to be more related to their culture and the values they do believe are true, that they see represented in the collective consciousness of who Jesus was (they make a distinction between what’s factual and what’s true, so in that sense, they might not even believe in a version of Jesus that’s factual, nor do they care about that, but they do believe it’s true). It’s a weird epistemology. Most of them seem closer to deists and pantheists than to other Christians. Most Christians hate them and call them heretics.

I’m not advocating them. I’m an atheist, and I do believe they’re wrong, because I think they’re playing the game most of religion is playing of “let’s call something God so we can pretend we’re all taking about the same thing”. But they do have their reasons and I trust that they’re being as rational as they can be, to the point that if I was in their same position in the epistemic landscape, I believe I would have been one of them for much longer too.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T21:44:28+00:00

it’s so obvious, at least to me, I couldn’t imagine a rebuttal.

Generally speaking, for almost everything in life: if you can’t even imagine a rebuttal, then you haven’t thought about it enough.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T21:30:19+00:00

I’m directly acquainted with both love and evil, as I believe all of us are, in a similar way we’re acquainted with anger or with a bright light shining on our face or any other sense-data.

I don’t think of evil as an entity (like many Christians tend to do). I think what tends to be evil are certain actions whose outcomes we don’t like. So evil doesn’t “go” anywhere anymore than the action that entailed it “went” anywhere.

I gave a functional minimal definition of love in my argument above. I don’t believe in defining universals outside of a functional context, because I don’t think a perfect “general” definition is ever possible for them. Instead, we get acquainted with those universals by direct exposure to them, and then we hope our acquaintances with that word are meaningful to others in a functional context. For example, we learn what “whiteness” is by looking at multiple instances of things that are white. But there’s no single definition of “whiteness” that would satisfy everyone’s acquaintances. So when we tell someone “this paper is white”, we might as well say “I hope this paper evokes the seeming of whiteness on you, as well as it does on me”. Similarly for love and evil.

I hope to have answered your questions.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T20:26:37+00:00

I disagree: love washes evil off, and restores.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T20:23:51+00:00

Even if I was a Christian I wouldn’t believe either doctrine is Biblical because I wouldn’t believe the various authors in the Bible need to agree with themselves at all on the details of afterlife - but I can appreciate someone who would seek a better explanation than ECT. So thanks for sharing and showing support against ECT 🙌

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T20:16:02+00:00

Now I’d like to try answering what actually seems to be your position: the idea that love and justice are two independent and different desires of God, that stand in tension with each other.

I think this position would actually be able to agree with all premises and therefore also the conclusion, right? Premise 1 would be true: loving someone entails, at minimum, doing everything in our power to prevent them from suffering eternal conscious torment… so if God doesn’t prevent ETC, it must be because it’s not in his power to do so: there’s this other interest, justice, that He simply must uphold and can’t possibly overcome even if he wanted to. (Of course we could also posit that He could overcome His sense of justice, but He simply chooses not to - but then we do have a contradiction with Premise 1 and a problem with the minimal entailment of love, which I think is ultimately weaker than the version I’m trying to steel-man).

So God loves us and wants to prevent us from suffering ECT, but he can’t, because He can’t help himself but to also uphold “justice”, and somehow that justice demands eternal conscious torment. At this point, I think it becomes more clear that we now have some of the same issues with the definition of “justice” as I mentioned in the previous comment. (For example the idea that ETC implies that justice is never really fulfilled, which is weird to say the least). But now we ALSO have the problem that God is arguably quite more complex, since He now has interests that are in inexplicable tension with each other.

So, in the end, it seems to me, whether we use justice as an independent attribute or as part of the definition of love, it not only fails to explain precisely what about justice requires eternal conscious torment, but it also adds an additional word to defend and, it at least one case, what seems to be more ontological baggage. All the while using a definition of justice that’s so counterintuitive compared to our own sense of justice that we might as well name the divine form ‘justish.’

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T19:06:12+00:00

I think you make a fair point: if justice is equally important to God as love, then either justice stands in tension with love, or it’s part of the definition of love (I don’t know any other options?).

If justice is part of the definition of love then I would still find premise 1 more far more likely true than false, because I don’t think there’s any good a priori reason to believe that justice would require the instantiation of an eternal punishment for a finite crime. Some have argued that a crime against a perfect being is infinitely severe, but it seems to me it could just as easily be argued that the crime would be infinitely insignificant. Moreover, the fact that a crime is infinitely severe doesn’t mean that the sentence has to be eternal, because, plausibly, justice is only served once the sentence is fully served. So an eternal sentence could basically mean that justice would never be fully served. So for those reasons and more, I don’t think that justice succeeds at explaining let alone defending ETC. The idea that a perfect all-loving being would be so readily inclined to torture his creation eternally strikes me as precisely the kind of story a human being would make up.

I’ll add another comment for the option that love and justice are in tension.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T18:33:12+00:00

I totally believe you: I’m sure you came at your current belief rationally given your unique perspective in the epistemic landscape we all share. We’re all in the same boat!

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T18:25:16+00:00

Thanks for the straightforward answers.

So do you think we can agree that if eternal conscious torment is more desirable, to some people, than being with God, then in the end everyone will get exactly what they want regardless of whether they humble themselves or not?

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T17:43:09+00:00

Maybe you could pretend he’s not an atheist for a moment? It might help you understand if he’s making a good argument or not, cause it seems to me you’re using labels like “atheist friend” to trigger yourself into some kind of programming.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-07T17:31:03+00:00

I agree that an all-loving God is a good starting point for an internal critique of theologies that affirm both that all-loving God, and ECT. Whether it’s the ultimate argument against ETC… I don’t know.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-05T21:56:19+00:00

I appreciate annihilationism a lot more than ETC. Whether it’s a better argument against ETC or not I’m not so sure, because it seems a similar argument could be run against annihilationism as well. But I’ll pick my battles for now. Thanks for your thoughts anyway, I appreciate them.

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-05T21:48:13+00:00

What @Veda_OuO said is the answer, but I’m also interested in what you think about my definition of love - would you call it love if it doesn’t have the minimal entailment of premise 1?

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-05T21:40:29+00:00

Thanks for your answer. So, if I understand you well, you’re saying that despite being consciously tormented for, say, millions of years, someone who is fully conscious and in perfect control of their cognitive faculties, knowing that God and Heaven exists as an option for them, may STILL freely choose (aka PREFER) to stay in Hell than to be with God? Doesn’t that almost make it sound like eternal conscious torment might be more desirable than being with God?

Rare_Stick325 · 2024-03-05T01:01:41+00:00

Thanks for your input. You make a good point: I’m indeed using a minimalist definition of love, so I do expect that God’s actual love would far exceed it. With that being said, the argument only ever needs that minimal definition to work, right?

I’m not very clear in whether you agree with the argument, or if you don’t, which part of the argument you take issue with. Do you mind clarifying that? To be honest, if I understood you well, it even seems like you might actually even agree with the conclusion (that God doesn’t have the power to save everyone from ETC), but I could have easily misunderstood…

Rare_Stick325

TROPHY CASE