It seems to me like you're trying to show off here. I said only that writers like Nietzsche, Kafka, and the rest, along with the seminal revolutions set out the character of modernity. I didn't say modernists have to agree with everything they said, so you've thrown down a number of red herrings. Obviously I reject Dostoevsky's Christianity, and I reject also Nietzsche's relativism and social Darwinism. If you don't see how those thinkers nevertheless reflected the modern conditions that were prevailing all around them, such as the crisis of the loss of meaning, the alienation of isolated individuals, the death of God, the undermining of morality, and so on, you must be reading different history textbooks than I am.

Sure, there's room for disagreement about the nature of modernity. But those differences will be mostly about interpreting the details, not the essential transition. We went from feudalism and monarchy to capitalism and democracy. And we went from a hyper-conservative, theocratic culture to a secular, liberal one; from dogmatic Christendom to scientific and philosophical skepticism; and from relative stagnation to accelerated progress. Most importantly for this discussion, we went from societies that took Christian dogmas for granted, to ones that didn't because they separated church and state. Those are all undeniable elements of modernity.

I was amused to read that you specialize in economics. I'm not an expert in economics, but my understanding is that economics is indeed a pseudoscience, and I've laid out that charge in writing. It seems to me the neoclassical economist's hyper-rational model of the self functions mainly as propaganda for laissez-faire markets. The idea is to show that economies can run themselves towards "equilibrium," without government involvement or redistributions, because individuals will do the right thing if left alone. The results are supposed to be fully merited, in which case the rich get to keep all their wealth. The real world has falsified the model, and it persists not because it's scientifically respectable, but because the exotic math obscures the economist's political commitment to plutocracy.

But yes, economics could be considered a science or at least a work of rigorous engineering in an instrumental, pragmatic sense, which is one that interests me. We'd just have to be clear on the model's use. The point would be that a model can be a useful tool even if the model isn't strictly true (and even if the correspondence theory of truth makes no sense or is a piece of ontotheology). In that case, the pragmatic question would be about the subject that's effectively controlled with the tool.

Evidently, neoclassical economics would be meant to control the masses for the benefit of the upper class, so this would be a case of secular society's making excuses for its return to the dominance hierarchies for which religious theologies used to provide the cover in the old monarchies. There would have been a switch only from Latin Christian propaganda to the economist's mathematical kind. But in Marxian terms, the material arrangement of the societies would be little changed, despite the shift in the ideological "superstructure."

I agree that an appeal to a zeitgeist can be lazy, if that's what you're suggesting. I'm open to the possibility that we're leaving modernity behind or that standard conceptions of the modern period are flawed. You'd have to make the case, though. I don't think my conception of modernity is so farfetched. It's standard stuff, as far as I can tell.

But no, my reference to the modern zeitgeist was not just an expression of confidence in science. I'm talking about the cultural character, and about the mythos that brands the ethos. There's no need for the reasoning here to be circular since I say this culture pushes us towards atheism due to the culture's individualism, skepticism, alienation, secularism, freedom of thought, mass dispersal of information, humanistic progress, and so on. Those factors needn't presuppose atheism, but they certainly challenge the medieval framework in which monotheism flourished (and still flourishes in the Muslim world).

I agree that it makes sense to think of the burden of proof in real-world debates rather than in the abstract. There are certainly impudent monotheists who haven't gotten the message about the historic transition to modernity, so they're not ashamed to promote their religious anachronisms. Indeed, they condescend to skeptics and atheists as if the rug hadn't pulled out from under the Church or Islamic patriarchy.

Now, that state of affairs can be explained in different ways. Honestly, the question of the burden of proof isn't so crucial to me, because however you want to interpret this fact, in my experience the atheist easily has the upper hand in the debates these days, whereas centuries ago he'd have been burned at the stake. Saying there's been a monumental change in the burden of proof may just be a way of understanding that fact, that Christian apologetics, for example, looks like just another mass-produced commodity rather than like sacred eternal truth.