Aristotle used empirical evidence to inform his models
Aristotle claimed heavy objects fell to the ground because they loved the noble positions and wanted to be close to it. He also said that heavy objects would fall faster.
The story of Elijah and the priests of Baal (in which a public experiment is used to falsify one of two mutually exclusive models, implying consistency as the first criterion for truth and correspondence with evidence as the second)
Are you claiming that the God of Elijah is different to Christ?
Is this prescriptive or descriptive? I did eventually make my way to answer your question head on. You asked me where does your imagination fail and my answer is that my imagination fails on imagining and internally consistent universe that is not internally consistent.
I instantly flinch away from neither. I spent approximately fifteen of my first twenty years imagining myself in a world where I was mistaken in my faith. But I did not believe it, no matter how fervently I believed that I believed.
I have no instinctual flinching away from imagining a world in which I do not exist, either. I have imagining a world that is identical to this one (with me in it) in which I do not exist.