What an utterly insane, arbitrary way for God to sort the wheat from the chaff! Why in God's own name would he proceed as you suggest? And who would want to follow such a God anyway?

Because, God wants people who want to find Him. If there is no leap of faith for people to take because they want to find Him, then a lot of rebels will wind up believing while continuing to reject His authority. That last leap of faith separates those who will become members of his family from the demons - "who also believe, and tremble"

Regardless, your attempt to back away from your prior claim that faith is blind is just digging a deeper hole. You were, in fact, very clear in what you meant. Read your quote above again. According to your own theory, the geniuses of faith that you seemingly so admire didn't come to Christianity by evidence or reason but rather by overcoming their "rational skepticism". Again, why would God demand that only those who can overcome rational skepticism will be saved? Wouldn't it make sense for him to demand, if anything, that they overcome only irrational skepticism? But, even this requirement makes salvation "earned" rather than freely given.

I have backed away from nothing. I have doubled down on it. It is entirely possible to arrive at belief in two stages - first by rational skepticism and then by a leap of faith. Some, like children, only need the leap of faith. Those of us gifted with greater analytical skills are burdened with the difficulty of not knowing when to let go and take the final leap. Those who stubbornly, desperately, hold onto their skepticism to the point of demanding 100% proof with zero faith will never know anything - and that is what I am saying needs to be overcome.

And in any event, your geniuses of faith didn't know what we know today. They didn't know about genes. The didn't know, for instance, that order can arise from disorder (or less order) via "natural selection." They didn't know about plate techtonics or the dinosaurs. And they knew almost nothing about other religions (except maybe Judaism and Islam). In short, while geniuses of their age, they knew less about the world than today's average sixth grader, and they came to their conclusions from that dark place of ignorance. In short, they had an excuse. You don't.

They were the fathers of the Age of Enlightenment, the inventors of the scientific method, philosophers of the highest esteem, and an old rocket scientist. We have far more archeological evidence than they had that the Bible is correct. We have the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we have DNA - the Prime example of design if there ever was one. Natural selection is not in dispute. Natural creation of designs to select from is in dispute.

Anyway, my reason for mentioning them is not to imply they knew everything. It was only to point out that they were (a) brilliant and (b) rational. Two of the characteristics that unbelievers often try to say are missing from believers. That was my only reason for bringing them up.