Yeah, they really fucked up there. Also by equating faith with belief ("firmly denied any faith or only gave lip service... without truly believing"). You might qualify whatever statements you derive from evidence with "these are just assumptions which I act on, not articles of faith", but by acting on them, you are arguably evincing belief in them. Apostasy would be possible in FR, but to reach a state of atheism you would have to act as though the extremely obvious effects of the gods on the everyday world had some other, "Copernican" cause.FrankTrollman wrote:the fact that evidence based assumptions are not faith by definition
While in the real world "gods" are just one of the many transcendental guarantors that people believe in, in D&D they have stat blocks and are therefore not transcendental. I think this means it doesn't matter at all what they do, since someone with a better stat block can change it, like in TarkisFlux's campaign. Not really any big philosophical issues at stake, just questions like why the hell would you worship someone you'll be big enough to kill in a couple months if you keep raiding dungeons.