u/FinancialGeneral919

I'm a new convert from atheism. About a year ago, I suddenly had an experience that made me realize that God was real. And I knew that Christianity was really the only option because of Jesus' sacrificial love. I was thinking about whether I actually wanted to join the religion, weighing the pros and cons, and I remember thinking "I can tolerate so many things, I can change how I live and how I think if this really is the truth, but I cannot worship a God who sends his creations to eternal hell, even if he is real." I only decided to take the plunge when I found out universalism was a thing. I don't think I would've been able to accept it otherwise.

On top of that, the whole story of the bible just makes no sense to me under infernalism. It's so anti-climactic. God loves the world so much that he sent his son to redeem it, he has conquered sin and death, and he's gonna make everything new... but actually, a bunch of his creations are gonna be burning in hell for all eternity. It doesn't just not feel nice, it's completely incoherent to me. It feels like he has failed to save the people he loves. I don't think I could ever get past this without some severe mental gymnastics or just turning off my reasoning, and I honestly don't know how infernalists manage this. Any sort of attempt to justify it ("God doesn't send us to hell, we send ourselves", invincible ignorance, etc) is utterly unsatisfying, and I can't convince myself of any of them.

However, there are so many passages that suggest eternal torment, and even though there are universalist interpretations of them, it's more than enough to make me start questioning if what I believe is true. It's also kinda hard to look at the millions of people who have believed in ECT for 2000 years and say "they're all wrong."

When a non-Christian says to me "a loving God would not send people to hell for all eternity" I want to be like "Yeah, you're right, and he doesn't." But I don't, because what if I'm wrong? Then I'm spreading misinformation and false teaching.

It's so scary because it's not just that I'll have to accept a new doctrine. If ECT is true, I'll probably stop being a Christian altogether. Losing my faith would be absolutely devastating, as turning to Christ was the best thing to have ever happened to me. Maybe my faith is just weak, but this isn't one of the doctrines that I can just say "I don't know" to and take it on faith.

Sorry if this isn't well-written, I'm just not sure what to do. My Christian friends all believe in ECT, and my pastor doesn't care as much about theological orthodoxy so I don't feel super comfortable going to her. I'm not sure who to go to, though.

I've been looking into different arguments for God, and revisited the ontological argument, which I, for a really long time, rejected as reasoning God into existence.

However, after engaging with the cosmological argument and what it means to be a necessary being, the argument makes a bit more sense if you frame it as:

Premise 1: It is possible for a necessary being (God) to exist.

Premise 2: If a necessary being is possible, that means that it exists in some possible worlds.

Premise 3: If a necessary being exists in some possible worlds, it must exist in all possible worlds (by its own nature).

Premise 4: If a necessary being exists in all possible worlds, it exists in our world.

Therefore, a necessary being (God) exists.

I would never use this argument to convince an atheist that God exists, but I can't really think of any way to get around it unless you try to argue that God is impossible, which is a pretty tall order. I am not attempting to make this argument right now, by the way, this little thing I'm writing cannot even nearly do it justice.

However, whenever someone argues for the ontological argument, they almost always define God as "that which no greater can be conceived." So all-powerful, all-loving, eternal, etc. But this seems to assume that "great" is actually a concrete thing rather than just a subjective rating in our human minds. Whether something is capable of existing or not, that's concrete. But greatness? From the perspective of many non-theists, "greatness" is not a thing that exists. Whether something being all-loving is great or not is just our opinion. So that, in my opinion, would be just reasoning God into existence using a standard that we made up (from the perspective of a non-theist).

However, I'm pretty new to the faith, so I wanna know if I'm missing something because this argument was made by people much smarter than me.

Any resources for answering this doubt someone could point me towards?

Different people seem to hold different views. I've met people who are like "you can be an atheist and still be a Christian as long as you follow Jesus' teaching" and I've met people who are like "if you don't believe in strict young earth creationism, you're going to hell." Where do you stand?