And while I agree that there are troubling existential worries for the atheist, such that virtue and despair may in some cases go together, I don't think this amounts to a problem for most non-religious folks most of the time. While broad factors of despair, which is what the existential worries are, can factor into someone's depression, I think it's really local factors of despair – the details of your life – that drives the live-ability of one's life.
In other words, even if an atheist has cause for despair from broad and regional considerations, as long as their life is going well, it's hard to fault them from happily pressing forward. It gets complicated though when the atheist is the contemplative type to the point where the broad factors affect them so much that they become local; or more precisely, the local factor that the atheist is this type of person, i.e. the contemplative type, becomes a factor of despair. Because being contemplative and facing the truth head-on, no matter how dark, is a virtue, virtue and despair may go together on atheism (especially when combined with pro-theism; that is, the person who loves God but cannot believe despairs). The question is whether the broad factors of despair really are factors of despair to begin with—whether the genuine truth-seeker ought to be affected by existential facts in such a personal and emotional way.
Anyway, Gavin says another interesting thing in that interview: that he doesn't believe on the basis of arguments, but on something else. He doesn't say experience exactly, but that is something I've heard Christians say. Plantinga's whole project is to show how Christians can have knowledge of Christianity without evidence. William Lane Craig has said that he believes by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.
My issue with this is that arguments are experience – intellectual experience. If you experience the aha of understanding what an argument commits you to, then that's added to your life experience. So when Christians say they don't believe on the basis of arguments, they are saying their intellectual experiences aren't enough – some other kind of experience is needed. Christians often make the analogy of falling in love – intellectual experience only goes so far, and then some kind of intuitional, emotional, existential, or religious experience is needed to fall in love with God and make a commitment to God. A certain emotional and spiritual experience is required to be a Christian anyway.
But if religious actions are grounded in belief, and beliefs are propositional, and propositions bear truth values, and matters of truth are intellectual matters, then religious actions, like all belief-based actions, must have their ground in intellectual experience lest they be irrational. It is irrational to believe in something as though it were true while admitting you have no reason to think it's true. That would be to contradict yourself, to claim a connection between the belief and truth (as one always implicitly claims by believing instead of withholding belief) while admitting there is no such connection.
Here Christians could bring up William James or Pascal's Wager: Under special circumstances it's rational to believe without intellectual experience. Intellectualization is not always feasible, and so sometimes we depend on a leap of faith. We might apply this to foundational beliefs too: intellectualization is not possible anyway all the way down.
Or we might say the wager itself attempts to provide intellectual experience to ground a leap of faith in religious belief. Maybe we can say something similar about foundational beliefs. In any case, it's too bad the wager fails: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2024/03/why-pascals-wager-cannot-be-salvaged.html
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