Evidently, you’re offended not by the article but by your strawman misrepresentations of it. You say I vaguely gesture “toward the entire history of Western philosophy.” Not so since that history includes the medieval period. I’m referring to modern philosophy which builds on the best from ancient Greece and Rome. And in that article I do indeed vaguely gesture towards that history because I fill in the blanks elsewhere, and I assume the reader is familiar with basic Western history.

I’ll give you an example of the kind of history I’m assuming. Western individualism rose with the Protestant Revolution, although it was presaged by the ancient mystery religions which Christianity adopted. The point of religion used to be to preserve the community, but the mystery religions made it personal. You could save yourself by becoming an adopted son or daughter of a savior deity who suffered and died for his followers. Eventually, that individualism flowered as capitalism and democracy, which undermined not just Christianity but religion, art, and even trust in authority figures and in metanarratives. The enthronement of that mystery religion called “Christianity” paved the way for the capitalist free-for-all which has Protestants eating each other’s lunch with prosperity gospels and other betrayals of what early Christianity stood for (socialism, pacificism, surrender of self to God, given the imminence of nature’s apocalyptic transformation).

That’s just one historical thread you could follow to see why exoteric (literalistic) religions seem quaint in the modern context.

You say I refer to the claims of my “intellectual interlocutors” as “being the rantings of the mentally ill.” Not so. That was an analogy, not a direct reference. I compared the modern skeptic’s dismissal of exoteric theists to the common consumer’s dismissal of mentally ill homeless people. I wasn’t calling any theist a mentally ill homeless person. That’s not how analogies work, and that wasn’t the point of my analogy.

I don’t know what kind of God you believe in, but I do know that a miracle-working Jesus is comparable to any number of mythic and folkloric entities that Christians dismiss out of hand. Did Jesus rise physically from the dead? Is that supposed to be a straightforward empirical claim, even though Paul’s notion of resurrection conflicts with that of the later gospels? And how would the resurrection claim differ from any other wishy-washy paranormal one that’s protected by its implicit untestability? Can you check whether fairies exist, or do they come and go as they please, following supernatural laws that dwarf science and philosophy?

Wouldn’t a physical resurrection be just as supernatural? So why say that speaking of such a supernatural event is especially rational? What does reason have to do with the supernatural? Reason naturalizes. Supernature surpasses reason. By claiming religion should be rational, you’re paving the way for atheism via philosophical naturalism.

I see that in your article, “Is it True there is no Good Evidence God Exists?” you say that “God provides a very powerful explanation for the world we observe.” Specifically, you say, God explains the nonphysical things like “consciousness, minds, intentions, values and free will.” But that’s just the God-of-the-gaps strategy. More importantly, while you appeal to unification as a standard of explanations, you neglect the other standards such as fruitfulness, scope, and above all ontological simplification or reduction. If you say one mystery produced another mystery, you haven’t explained anything, especially if the prior mystery is supposed to be even bigger than the later one.

So this is a case in which scientific progress showed us the difference between genuine and pseudo-explanations. Theism is a pseudo-theory at best. “God” isn’t a powerful explanation of anything, not in the modern sense. Rather than being an explanation, theism is a story, a myth that provides hope and comfort. Reason has nothing to do with that. On the contrary, reason undermines hope and comfort. The harder you look, the less comforting the world seems. That, too, is a consequence of modernity.

The real question here is why you want to set religion up to fail by having it compete with modern philosophy and science (and politics, economics, and culture). You accuse my article of being at odds with the value of interfaith dialogue. But it’s the pretense that theism succeeds on philosophical or rational grounds that’s bound to undermine the dialogue, because a pseudo-rational religion will only fail to achieve religion’s authentic purpose.

I’m aware of the history of Western theology. I know that Christian theologians tried to show that Christianity is philosophically superior to ancient polytheism, even as they resorted to burning and banning pagan books. Overall, the results of that labour were Orwellian casuistry and scholastic balderdash. Not every case of syncretism works out. The Christian, neo-Aristotelian synthesis was overthrown by the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the end of Western monarchic suppression of the masses. That’s why churches have no power anymore in modern secular societies (unless the churches sell out Jesus for an Americanized, capitalist cooptation of Christianity).

I don’t think we bridge the gap between people by lying or by pretending that up is down and black is white. Look, for example, at the backlash happening because of cancel culture. The Church tried to cancel progress by imposing Christendom in totalitarian fashion. Modernity happened despite those vain suppressions. Likewise, progressives want to cancel masculinity and politically incorrect viewpoints for not being sufficiently “woke.” This time, the backlash takes the form of authoritarian populism like Trump’s.

The better way is to be philosophically honest and humble. I’m sure you think I’m being arrogant in dismissing theism. But at least half of my writings are spent lambasting modernity and secular cultures. I aim to be honest in my writing, to help provide philosophical illumination. Your replies here would interest me more if they were less reactionary.