Ad hoc model of hell

Here's a way a finite hell might be able to make sense, even on hedonistic terms.

-Problem: it feels unjust to just let a moral monster into heaven. There is no difference between the fates of culprits and their victims. There is no way to separate the evildoers from their deeds, leading to distrust, hatred, unforgiveness, inability for assimilation.

-God is maximally socially intelligent and would understand perfectly that this cannot work. If you're going to reintegrate moral monsters into heaven, there has to be a process for this, a grand ceremony, a special ritual involving the drama of forgiveness and repentance.

-(God could just erase memories, but then what was the point of earth?)

-In hell, evil people experience the exact suffering that they caused others on earth.

-This allows for reconciliation in a number of ways:

-1) There is a difference maker between the fates of good people and evil people; we are not letting evil people get away with it

-Second, it fulfills the aspect of justice that we might call acknowledgement, or understanding; the evil person needs to acknowledge and understand the sheer evil of their actions; by experiencing the exact pain of their victims, they experience the evilness of their actions. You don't have to try to tell them or convince them that what they did was wrong, you directly show them the wrongness of their actions by forcing them to experience the pain that they caused.

-Third, the victim, knowing that the culprit understands the pain that they caused, now shares something in common with the culprit: a shared trauma, a shared pain, and a shared understanding of the evil that was caused.

-Fourth, the victim can forgive the culprit knowing that when the culprit apologizes, the apology is known to be sincere, because the victim knows that the culprit knows exactly the pain that they caused.

-This allows for reconciliation and forgiveness between moral monsters and their victims.

-This in turn allows for all persons to participate in eudaimonia, and not just people who happened to be initially good enough.

-This is better than annihilating the moral monster, because this way the victim also receives resolution. By annihilating the moral monster, you lose out on true resolution for the victim(s).

-This is better than annihilating the moral monster also because it does right by the moral monster; you don't make their lives retroactively absurd.

-This does right by maximizing eudaimonia by having an additional member of the eudaimonic system.

-This also requires a profound amount of virtue on the part of the victims, virtues pertaining to love and forgiveness and a relinquishing of hatred, pain, and protest.

-This means the torture of hell is smart. Instead of a dumb torture where the pain is meaningless, the pain comes explicitly from the harm the damned committed while on earth. The damned experience all and only the pain they caused others.

-Hell is temporary, as it lasts until you have gone through all the pain you caused others.

-This is hedonistically viable because it allows the damned to reintegrate harmoniously into a eudaimonic system, maximizing happiness.

The only problem with this model of hell is that it's totally ad hoc. There's no biblical evidence for it; there is biblical evidence against it, and it's not the orthodox model.

In fact, the plausibility of this model, insofar as it really is a plausible justification of hell, counts against Christianity exactly because Christianity fails to teach it. If Christianity fails to teach the most plausible model of hell, then that counts against Christianity.

This model is a plausible ethical model, meaning that its justification is plausible, though the idea that this hell is real is not plausible.

The point of this is to show that it's not necessarily the case that retributive punishment goes against a perfect being, or against hedonism.

The damned would not experience unbearable suffering in the sense that the damned would rather cease to exist than go through this suffering. It might not even be determined whether the damned are willing or not to undergo this experience. On some level, the damned might understand that while the pain is bad, the pain is for a good reason, and will eventually lead to eudaimonia. In fact, God could implant this background understanding into the damned mind to prevent the damned from experiencing unbearable suffering by giving them hope that eventually it will all work out.

Challenges to Christian Belief: Rundown

Capturing Christianity recently made a community post stating that Christianity is true. Make no mistake: Christianity is almost certainly false. Sometimes I'm tempted to drop the 'almost'. I do argue that we can be certain that infernalistic Christianity (where God sends people to eternal torture) is false, assuming that the Christian God is perfectly loving and good. Hell and perfection are logically incompatible. (You can even argue, as Graham Oppy does, that any imperfection at all is logically incompatible with perfection, let alone something as infinitely imperfect as hell.) David Lewis also argued that hell and perfection are logically incompatible. This is significant, because Christian traditions have largely taught hell. If hell and perfection are logically incompatible, then these traditions have been embarrassingly wrong about a doctrine of infinite importance. This destroys their credibility.

Let's give a very, very quick rundown of the sheer challenge to Christian faith.

1) Challenges from psychology, sociology, and evolution.

We have reason to be deeply suspicious of religion for evolutionary reasons. We know humans reproduce sexually. We know sexual reproduction is social in nature. We know humans rely on societies for resources. So both the individual and the species need social structures to survive. These social structures naturally lead to cliques or clique-like structures, tribalness, hierarchies, and so on. Religions provide substantial psychological benefits and provide rituals and practices that are enabling of reproduction. For example, beliefs in an afterlife alleviate anxiety, same with belief in a God who has everything under control and is on your side. Confidence is overwhelmingly valuable for us humans, and religious belief instills a great deal of confidence – a sense of purpose, a sense of protection, and a sense of understanding the world and your place in it. Church services unite young males and young females, leading to marriage and children.

This picture gives us a unified theory of religion – unified in the sense that we can explain all religions in terms of social and psychological laws emerging from biological laws. Christians cannot avail themselves of this powerful unifying theory because it would undermine Christianity. So Christians, along with all other religious believers, must engage in special pleading or ad hoc explanations for why other religions are false but their religion is not. (Christians blame Satan or demons for the existence of other religions.) By failing to acknowledge evolutionary, psychological, and sociological facts, Christians (and other religious believers) find themselves awkwardly opposed to data.

2) The irrationality of belief in hell.

Covered above.

3) The disappointment of the Bible.

The Bible contains mistakes of various kinds, to the point that Christian scholars happily admit this. They would say these mistakes needn't destroy core Christian doctrine. But what if these kinds of mistakes didn't exist? This would grant strong evidence that there is something special about the Bible. But as it stands, these mistakes (mistranslations, copy errors, typos, grammatical errors, suspicious authorship, contradictions, empirical falsehoods, etc.) make the Bible look like an ordinary work of human writing. For someone wanting a supernatural, God-made book, the Bible is disappointing.

The Bible also fails to include: 1) Uncontroversial, highly specific, highly important predictions for modern audiences; 2) Advanced knowledge of any science, mathematics, logic, or anything; 3) Any teachings on life that are so profound that they couldn't possibly come from anywhere but a supernatural source; and so on.

You also have problematic moral verses. Jesus teaches that you cannot get a divorce unless there is infidelity. So if a husband is violently abusive, you cannot get a divorce as long as he is not unfaithful.

Catholics will defend transubstantiation by saying that because followers of Jesus rejected his teaching of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, Jesus must have been saying something so crazy that it's unbelievable. This supports a transubstantiation interpretation. (How on earth is this a defense of Christianity and not an embarrassing confession is beyond me. You're admitting that your doctrine sounds crazy!)

But by this same logic, Jesus must have really been teaching that you cannot get a divorce unless there is infidelity, because there too Jesus' disciples said that if his teaching is true, it's better to not get married. (I imagine his male disciples were not worried about abusive wives. They probably had something else in mind. But domestic abuse by wives against husbands is a real thing, even if it's a minority of cases.)

A number of Paul's verses seem clearly misogynistic. Though, in contradiction, some also seem surprisingly egalitarian. We know Paul wasn't always writing; he was dictating and had scribes, so perhaps contradictions like this appear for that reason.

There are many problematic verses besides these pertaining to violence and slavery in the Old Testament. There are also many apparent contradictions. 

One example: 

Luke 9:50: But Jesus said to him, "Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you."

First of all, it's just false that 'whoever is not against you is for you.' Neutrality does not imply allyship. You might say that Jesus was saying this because if someone can cast out demons, they must be on God's side. Okay. Then why didn't Jesus say: "Do not stop him, for whoever casts out demons does so by the authority of God"?

Second, just two chapters later we read:

Luke 11: "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters."

It's also straight up false that when someone is not with you they are against you. Neutrality does not imply hostility or rejection.

But certainly it cannot both be the case that neutrality implies allyship and hostility!

You might say that the first applies only to his disciples, while the second applies only to Jesus. But why would Jesus be an exception to the first?

4) Christian reliance on secular methodology, and not the other way around.

Christians go to school. Why? To learn math, science, history, and so on. Non-Christians do not go to school to learn about Christianity (usually). They don't need to. Christians are forced to abide by methodological naturalism. Naturalists are not forced to abide by the Bible. You will not find a single non-Christian begrudgingly opening up a Bible because they need to solve a math problem, advance science, invent something, or in any way survive or gain any kind of practical advantage. The only context I could see this would be a fiction writing begrudgingly opening up a bible to read its stories to gain insight in story structure. That would make sense, as the Bible's stories are very well-structured, and frankly Hollywood could use all the help it could get.

Christians rely on an ordinary education so they can get ordinary jobs. There is nothing remotely extraordinary about Christians, their abilities, or their lives. If anything, Christianity tends to hold Christians back for various psychological reasons (discussed below under meager moral fruits).

5) Divine hiddenness

Enough said. WLC's "haunted house" response is one of the worst arguments in all of philosophy that I've heard.

6) Evil and the failure of theodicies

I've written on this somewhat extensively, though there's always more that can be said. I go through 13 theodicies and show severe problems with all of them.

Recently, the problem of evolution and animal suffering has had a massive impact on discussions around evil. It's really hard to see how a perfect being could create our world with such a "nasty, brutish, and short" kind of process to develop life. Animal suffering also is quite resistant to most theodicies. I've argued that we should expect a clear winning theodicy to be apparent to us if God is good, and yet we do not have one.

7) Evil and the failure of skeptical theism

I've written on this too. I think skeptical theism has multiple failure points. Just recently I attacked Hendrick's idea that existence is necessarily intrinsically good. To my shock, he admits that this idea is needed to defeat what he calls the strongest argument against skeptical theism. So if my attack works, the strongest argument against skeptical theism is back on the table.

8) Meager moral fruits

Christians are not supernaturally endowed with gifts of knowledge, competence, intelligence, wisdom, virtue, the ability to predict things, or anything. If they were, we would know by now. Now only are Christians not apparently noticeably better than non-Christians when it comes to moral knowledge or moral practice, but we can give psychoanalyses that explain how Christian belief could make one a worse person morally.

The following are practices or attitudes associated with Christians, Christianity, or the past of Christians or Christianity (not an exhaustive list):

• Being pro-life. There are significant arguments in favor of the pro-choice position, and Christians are not supernaturally gifted in responding to these arguments. Pro-life policies undeniably lead to morally abhorrent situations, such as when pregnant women facing complications are turned away from life-saving care out of fear of legal repercussions, leading to the death of the mother, and, ironically, the baby.
• Tribalism. You see this in church culture. Christians fail to overcome or rise above the biologically explicable tribalism that we find in all social contexts. Christians slot right into a naturalistic, evolutionary view of humanity.
• Slavery, racism, homophobia, demonization of human sexuality, false and harmful teachings causing religious trauma, blasphemy laws and violent punishments, corrupt collusions with states, exploiting people for money (think megachurches, televangelists, the prosperity gospel, and indulgences), sexual abuse of children, the covering up of the sexual abuse of children, and the failure to supernaturally detect and prevent the sexual abuse of children. The Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Mormon church all have skeletons in their closet. Except, those skeletons are out of the closet now. 

Here is one way that Christian belief can hold a Christian back: because they believe this life is temporary, sin-cursed, and so on, and they believe that they will go to heaven when they die, they can lack ambition in this life and basically treat this life as a throwaway. This leads to significant laziness. This gets exacerbated when the Christian believes in the power of prayer and that God, because he loves them, will save them from awful life circumstances. Prayer of course never works and so the Christian develops a kind of learned helplessness stemming from expectations of rescue from God. Christian belief can utterly paralyze the Christian and cause inaction, leading to a significantly worse life than would otherwise have been lived had the Christian instead understood that prayer does nothing, God isn't going to save you, if you want to be happy in life you need to fight for it. That's another thing that can exacerbate this: Christians are taught to accept their awful circumstances because if God allows it then it must be part of God's plan. This leads to an awful pathetic-ification where Christians are turned into spineless doormats who roll over and accept their awful circumstances instead of trying to proactively change them. "It's my cross to bear I guess...", or "This is God's plan, I guess...", or "God has his reasons...", they think. Tragic.

A clear moral failing on the part of Christians is revealed in a story by Rhett and Link. It's a really heartfelt story, and I'm so grateful for Rhett and Link speaking out about their deconversion when they could have stayed silent if they wanted to, when in some ways that would have been the easier thing to do socially speaking.

The story is that they had a friend who was dying from cancer. They were Christians and wanted to make sure he was saved. So they awkwardly preached the gospel to their friend, and it was a kind of awful thing, they admit. But they were doing the right thing. They were following the rules. Because they loved their friend they wanted their friend to be saved and go to heaven. But this desire led to treating their friend not as a human being, but an "object of salvation", or someone to be preached to. Josh Rasmussen in his interviews has mentioned the very same thing, that he had a change of heart at one point and realized how wrong it is to treat people as objects of salvation. I'm guilty of this very thing myself. Again, Christians have good intentions: they literally want to save someone. But because Christianity is false, this "saving" amounts to ignoring the human being in front of you, ignoring their pain, ignoring their needs, ignoring all of the truth of the real moment that you are in with that person, pushing all of that aside and forcing this conversion onto someone, when that is not how human psychology works. You cannot force someone to believe something that doesn't make sense to them! God, of all people, as the creator of humans, should understand this! And yet God seems to not understand the sheer awkwardness he has wrought by sending Christians on this mission to convert as many souls as possible before it's too late. If God is supposed to be a God of love and relationship, then he especially should be profoundly disturbed by the idea of people being treated as objects of salvation, which God should know would happen if he commanded the Great Commission!

9) Failure of Christian metaethics

Divine command ethics is challenged by the Euthyphro Dilemma. And WLC's response (I think from Bob Adams?) that God commands because he is good is poor. This still fails to define goodness. If you say God is literally the measure of goodness, then this is just straightforwardly false. This would mean "God is good" is a tautology, like saying "The meter bar is a meter long." But surely saying "God is good" is not so trivial. There is something else we mean by 'good.' Not to mention, it's obvious that we do not, and need not, invoke God to talk about good things, like good movies, good food, good friends, a good life, and so on.

10) Issues of doctrine:

Three doctrines border on incoherence, and at the very least come with severe theoretical costs: Trinity, Incarnation, and the Atonement

I would add the Eucharist and Faith as problematic doctrines. Inerrancy and inspiration are problematic too.

The Bible is filled with wisdom and beautiful stories. The idea of God incarnating as the race of creatures he creates to save them in some morally profound way that involves sacrifice, death, and resurrection is a very cool story. Christians like to say it's the best story ever told. Sadly, it's a story full of holes, and it's too good to be true.

Christianity faces numerous and severe challenges. There's a reason why the vast majority of humans are not Christian, especially those who are well-educated. I may fully agree that life would be infinitely more awesome if some version of Christianity were true. (Who doesn't want a perfect being to set everything straight on judgment day? Who doesn't want to go to an eternal paradise?) You can accept the parts of Jesus and God that are beautiful and instructive. You can accept the parts of the Bible that are true. I think meditating on what a perfect being would say to you can be an incredibly powerful personal practice. Praying for conviction of sin is one of the few genius inventions of Christianity. (Though how many Christians do you think pray for conviction of sin?) Though I'm not sure it's right to call it an invention of Christianity. But in any case, prayer as a practice of regular moral introspection is absolutely genius and non-Christians are worse off for not practicing it. In this regard Catholic Confession may alone make Catholicism superior as a practice to Protestantism.

There are so many problems with Christianity other than these. The problems are so deep and so wide. This is just a snippet, but even this is enough to see.

The peace that surpasses all understanding is perfectly understandable

Christians, like Paul, have been in situations where they suffer horribly. These are situations of imprisonment, martyrdom, or suffering under the pains of life. And yet, Christians report a sense of peace, calm, and even joy in these situations. In Philippians 4 (NRSVUE) we read:

Rejoice[b] in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.[c] 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about[d] these things. 9 As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.

There is an obvious psychoanalysis of this peace: by believing that death is not the end, and that death is the worst this world can do to you, you are in an existentially complete state. Put another way, you feel fundamentally safe. Caveat: this requires that you don't have any anxiety over whether you are living out God's plans for you – basically, as long as you don't feel like Jonah running away from your Nineveh.

Is it possible to learn this peace? "Not from a non-Christian", the Christian says.

But I disagree. While I've already written about this, I'll duplicate thoughts for this topic. I wrote the following in response to a prompt from class, about Socrates discussing how pleasures and pains, matters of the body, distract us from what matters most, which are matters of the mind and virtue:

Is it true that the body distracts us from what matters most?

In Christianity, God incarnates as Jesus, taking on a human body. From a Christian point of view, the human body is elevated and esteemed, validated by the God who designed and created the human body and the environment in which it lives. Even when Jesus rose from the dead, he did not turn into a bodiless spirit, but retained a physical body that somehow ascended to heaven.

Christians consider it a Gnostic heresy to say that the body is wretched and the soul pure, and that the physical is imperfect and evil while the immaterial is perfect and good. Indeed, the Christian would say that our souls are as corrupt as our bodies, both being corrupted by sin. It is only through faith in Jesus, and baptism, that the soul can be purified. So on one view, both the body and the soul are corrupt, and yet both are glorified and validated.

On a very different view, it is matters of the mind that distract us from what matters most, which are bodily affairs. For many folks, life just is a matter of family, sex, drugs, food, relationships, social experiences, traveling, and so forth—matters of the body. Matters of the mind are irrelevant, or even distracting us from living life. Philosophy, on this view, causes “analysis paralysis,” leading to a paralyzed life. While some people, like me, love to stay inside and read and write, many others would consider this an impoverished way of living, and a failure to live life to the fullest, which requires one to go out and do things in an embodied way.

On a third view, what matters most is transcendence. I’m reminded of a lyric I wrote long ago:

Aim for pleasure

And you won’t survive the pain

Aim for transcendence

And death will transcend your aim

I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t aim for a life free of suffering, as that sets you up to be most vulnerable to suffering. Instead, we should engage in work we find so important that it’s worth suffering for. Transcendence refers to this ability to overcome suffering, even transform it into something good. Transcendence also refers to achieving a level of consciousness and existence that is higher than what you’ve had previously.

Death threatens transcendence, because you cannot exist on a higher level when you don’t exist at all. So, as the lyric suggests, we have a dilemma: If we focus on an embodied way of being, and ignore matters of the mind and soul, then we make ourselves too vulnerable to pain and won’t have a way to surpass our pain. And yet, if we aim for transcendence as a way to overcome pain, death threatens our transcendence. This dilemma lies at the core of the “human predicament.”

So how do we solve this dilemma? This is why Christianity is so powerful: it solves the problem of death through the promises of eternal life that Jesus makes to His followers.

But for those who find the challenges to Christian belief too challenging, this is not an option. If you find the idea of heaven too good to be true, you must admit that on some level death wins and we lose.

However, there is a way to transcend even death, not by defeating death, but by sharing in death’s victory. If you allow death to motivate you to work as hard as possible while you still have time, then, if you’re lucky, you will have the resources needed to create that thing or achieve that achievement that allows you to die happy. (Something even Christians may feel pulled by.)

If you can achieve something so great, at least of such great personal importance, that you enter into a state of bliss such that you can genuinely die happy, then, by enabling this possibility, both in terms of the urgency and of the magnitude of the achievement – of such magnitude that you can die happy – death itself becomes the mechanism by which you transcend. Death glorifies you indirectly through this achievement at the same time it humiliates you through your destruction.

If the achievement lasts beyond the grave, then you will have achieved the closest thing to immortality that we can. Though, it’s not the immortality that matters, but the state of being able to die happy. It just so happens that achieving such a state requires achieving something of great personal significance, and often such achievements will be the kind that leave a mark on the world. But you could have a person who does some great work behind the scenes that doesn’t last beyond their lifetime, but who is nevertheless connected to the work in such a way that they can die happy having done it. I think parenthood can be like this, a great work (when done right) that involves giving up yourself to build up someone else. When people say "Some people should never be parents," part of what they are getting at is the fact that some people are not connected to the work of parenthood in the right way; they see parenthood as a burden and not as a core part of their life's work.

Matters of the body can distract us from transcending death in this way: if someone ignores death and strives not to achieve that which will enable one to die happy, but instead lives in the moment and pursues entertainment, then death will creep up on them and they will have little, in their own eyes, to show for their life. They may find themselves regretful in the end, suffering at the thought of dying, because they cannot die happy. Those who do not account for death in the way they live run the risk of suffering in this way. Though, it's possible for someone to not know what it would take for them to die happy until after they have already achieved it, perhaps even ironically thanks to their ignoring death, living in the moment, and pursuing entertainment.

A disadvantage for the non-Christian is that achievements are not a reliable method of transcendence. It requires a great deal of luck to be able to achieve one's essential personal goal. Some folks will find it impossible not to desire something too ambitious, and will thus be stuck in unfulfilled desires. The Christian, on the other hand, need only believe, and from their beliefs come hope.

Paradoxically, as in the case of the Christian martyr, both horrendous suffering and existential completeness can be found in a person at the same time. Hope, from believing the best is yet to come, allows one to endure suffering, so of course a hope-based existential completeness is compatible with horrendous suffering. But does this mean that only a hope-based existential completion can withstand horrendous suffering?

I don't think so. "Die happy" needn't be taken so literally. Even Jesus, a paradigm of existential completion, didn't die happy in a strict sense. What matters is whether, in addition to your suffering, there is the added suffering of feeling incomplete, like you didn't do what you set out to do. As long as you feel complete, the most important pain is avoided. Achievement-based existential completion is just as compatible with a painful death as a hope-based one. Death is the worst the world can do to you, and for those who can die happy, not even the worst can impede their happiness. Feeling fundamentally safe in this way generates a profound inner peace, even in the face of death and suffering, even for the one without hope in a life to come.

"Christians believe not by arguments, but by experience"

In this post (https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/01/gavin-ortlund-on-what-we-lose-when-we.html) I talk about Gavin Ortlund's interview. Ortlund remarks about how difficult it is to live as an atheist. But living as a Christian can be even harder (really, impossible) given the challenges to Christian belief. 

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