Your criticism about the bogus war between science and faith was ambiguous so I tried to steelman it. What would be untenable in scholarly circles is to say that those with religious faith are unable to be rational or scientific, so that faith would be psychologically antithetical to reason. To apply that claim to me would be a strawman.
If you’re talking about the more interesting claim that religious faith itself is rational, there’s no scholarly consensus about that, so your criticism is based on a false assumption. If anything, the consensus among scientists and philosophers is that religious faith is irrational, and that science can be made to seem consistent with religious creeds only when the latter are reduced to unfalsifiable poems, which would make the consistency trivial.
In any case, I suspect you’re barking up the wrong tree because what you really have in mind is the new atheist stereotype, deriving, as you say, from the Enlightenment, that the atheistic worldview is perfectly rational whereas religions are perfectly irrational. If you read further in my many writings on the subject, you’ll find that I argue on existentialist grounds that all worldviews are fundamentally irrational and fictive. I argue explicitly against the scientism of new atheism, and I argue for a pantheistic, naturalistic form of mystical, atheistic spirituality/existential authenticity or heroism. So much of what you say here isn’t strictly relevant as a criticism of my views.
Still, for the sake of the dialogue, the fact that the Church fathers didn’t publicly say that Christianity is a sham isn’t decisive evidence. Their beliefs can be inferred from their behaviour, not from their casuistic words. If they weren’t so literalistic, and they interpreted their scriptures allegorically and philosophically, allowing therefore for multiple interpretations, why did they persecute the Gnostics? Elaine Pagels explains why: they reverted to literalism about the Christian narrative for political reasons, to secure an alleged lineage from Jesus to the Catholic popes. That basis for the emerging Catholic literalism was plainly cynical, regardless of how that literalism was sold.
Your comparison between Christian mass ignorance and the secular kind about science is specious. We defer to scientific experts because their knowledge has stupendous technological applications which testify to their expertise. Priests have no such ostensible, testable demonstrations of theirs.
Your claim that atheism is unfalsifiable presumes that there’s an equal burden of proof, which isn’t so. It doesn’t matter whether nonbelief in Santa Claus is technically unfalsifiable (because it’s hard or impossible to prove a negative). There’s no such burden to prove that negative, because a believer in the existence of Santa Claus would have the much greater burden. Should that burden fail to be met, nonbelief in Santa would be rationally justified. It’s the same with gods, miracles, and so forth.
Your point that Christians are obviously enjoined to be rational because they have brains with which to think is at cross-purposes with the Christian doctrine of original sin. The Platonic context of Christianity is such that our natural form is hardly an indicator of what we ought to be doing. We have natural lusts to fornicate, but the Church doesn’t take that as prescriptive (Thomistic sophistry notwithstanding). No, our bodies were corrupted by the Fall, and reason makes us hubristic and too godlike, whereas we’re supposed to be like the naive children who came to Jesus.
Your last paragraph commits the genetic fallacy. Do you mean to reduce modernity to Christendom because the one came from the other? Why not reduce Christianity to Judaism and paganism, then, since the former emerged from the latter? Again, modernity could come from Christendom because of our mental capacity to deal with cognitive dissonance. Faith-based and rational beliefs are still at odds, but the human mind is flexible enough to entertain them both, especially since our nature is far from perfectly rational.
