Thanks. I appreciate the constructive criticism.
The heart of the analogy is between Trillionairity and monotheism. The point isn’t to establish religion’s irrationality; rather, it’s that the burden of proof is relative to default assumptions. I say this at the start of the section, “Burden of Proof and Default Assumptions”:
“I trust you see the parallel between Trillionairity and theistic religions. And this is roughly all you need to know to understand the atheist’s burden of proof. That burden is relative to what’s assumed as self-evident or as common knowledge. Some assumptions are universal in human experience, while others are more controversial, depending on the period, the level of social development, and an individual’s upbringing.”
You seem to be suggesting that the difference between theists and atheists is more like that between humans and Martians. True believers, as opposed to secularized theists (hypocrites) may indeed be as mentally ill as Martians would seem to us. But our common human nature tends to lend some pathos even to members of the most bizarre cults. The Trillionairist cult is bizarre, as is Christianity—relative to a different set of default assumptions. And the epistemic burden of proof depends on which set of assumptions is taken as the default. That’s the point of the analogy, and I think it’s crystal clear.
I agree that Protestant individualism fuelled the Scientific Revolution and should be included as proto-modern. I don’t think it was straight Christianity or Protestantism, though, that fed scientific doubts about the medieval synthesis. If anything, Protestant doubts were fed by the Gnostic and other heretical pagan movements like Hermeticism that persisted despite the Church’s attempt to control everyone’s minds in Europe. The early-modern scientists tended not to be orthodox Christians.
To the extent, though, that Christianity provided fertile ground for the modern revolutions, that would have been because of the prevalence of Christian hypocrisy and virtual secularization (i.e. the wholesale abandonment of the otherworldliness of Jesus’s message). Christianity was based on a failed prophecy about the imminent end of the world, and on a subversive, hippie-like message about how the last should be first and the first will be last. Those messages don’t work in the real world, so the Church had to revamp its theology, co-opting as much paganism as possible which eventually overloaded the original Christian mindset and allowed for more thoroughgoing skepticism. It’s just a gradual waning or self-secularization of Christianity.
In any case, my point in the article is that once this historic shift happened, so did a revaluation of the epistemic default assumptions. That means the burden of proof has swung in favour of atheism, thanks in part to Christianity’s self-sabotage.
The immensity of the universe supports the intuitiveness of atheism because that immensity is contrary to anthropocentrism. The intuition behind Christianity is that God loves us so much he knows the number of hairs on our head, and he sent his son to die for us. That intuition makes sense only when our planet is supposed to be the centre of a relatively small universe, as in the ancient flat-earth theory. Now that we know the universe has a gazillion galaxies and “centres,” the anthropocentrism behind Christianity is just laughable. Any deity that would have created this alien universe isn’t remotely human or parental and loving enough to be worshiped by human people.
The “cause” of the Big Bang will be as alien as quantum mechanics, not as familiar as a father figure’s issuing an order like “Let there be light,” in a patriarchal context. Let’s not pretend it still makes sense to reduce everything to the social terms we understand best, when science excels at doing the opposite, at objectifying phenomena to capture their alienness and indifference to our preferences.
Methodological naturalism isn’t extraordinary since it’s the standard operating procedure of science, and it’s science now that’s taken for granted, not the Christian creed. Those who still take seriously that creed are increasingly in the position of the Trillionairists, so they’re either alienated from secular society or they make a mockery of their religion to fit into the new zeitgeist.
