Here's an irony: the best religious response to atheistic criticisms consists of two words, and few apologists have ever spoken them.

For centuries, skeptics, secular humanists, and philosophical naturalists have refuted religious dogmas and rejected religious institutions and practices. God doesn't exist, so the scriptures and creeds are absurd, and religious organizations are grandiose frauds making a mockery of our potential to progress by solving problems with reason and empathy.

Christianity and Islam have been especially insistent that theism is rational. Otherwise, how could the monotheist's gruesome eschatological narrative be justified? How could outsiders deserve to be punished forever in Hell if there were any good reason to reject these religions?

The Catholic Church, for instance, confronted ancient Greek philosophy and tried to absorb not just its content but its methods and standards. For the Church to be universally valid for humanity, God had to conquer all terrains, including those that demons had supposedly distorted to undermine God's Creation. Everything had to point to God, according to the monotheistic narrative, so reason couldn't be an entire cognitive faculty that subverts the Church and its scriptures and traditions. The Church had to assimilate human reason, resolving the conflict between faith and reason by mounting a quasi-philosophical defense of Christian theology.

That defense has only ever been grossly sophistical and casuistic. Apologists beg the question and perpetrate fallacy after fallacy in defense of the plainly ridiculous. So, theism is irrational, and atheistic arguments are superior to theistic ones. I've argued as much in around a hundred articles to date.

Nevertheless, there's an adequate religious response to that philosophical demonstration of theism's irrationality, and as I said, the response is only two words long: "So what?"

Again, we know historically and theologically why some apologists thought they had to show that their religions are rational. But what they missed is that the ideal of hyperrationality, of ensuring that all our beliefs and practices are impeccably logical and empirically well-supported, is practically a mental disorder.

The problem is that secular cultures are irrational too. Liberalism isn't deduced or scientifically demonstrated. What's rational is the understanding that there's a naturally evolved species of clever animals, called "humans," and that the members of this species are normally able to think for themselves.

But the conviction that people ought to be free to do what they like isn't strictly rational. Instead, the liberal's conclusion that people should be liberated from all forms of oppression and servitude is based on the horror of naturalness. This moral side of liberalism reduces to an aesthetic impulse of disgust and an existential choice to side with personhood against manifestations of impersonality in nature.

We don't know that humans have rights. We feel we do because nature's physicality plainly has none, due to its impersonality, and that fact implicitly disgusts all who partake of civilized progress. We want humans to have rights because we don't want to be as monstrous as the lifeless, mindless, amoral bulk of the universe. That disgust or pride isn't strictly a rational judgment. It's a judgment based on fear, alienation, loathing, and hope. We hope we can live up to liberal humanist ideals that we dream up and that fly in the face of nature's indifference.

Secular societies and their humanist institutions are quite irrational in various respects. Consumerism, for instance, is palpably irrational and even self-destructive. Our addiction to social media is irrational. The destruction of the biosphere to feed our appetite for meat is irrational. The idolizing of spoiled celebrities is irrational. The assumption that culture can progress because science and technology can is fallacious. Our culture wars, such as the political one between Republicans and Democrats in the United States, are often infantile.

Hence, when the skeptic argues that theism is irrational, the theist is free to say, "So what?" That is, the theist can ask why we should expect any culture to be rational since culture stems from engagement with the human existential condition. Reason isn't a sufficient response to the horrific facts that surround us. We must respond to nature's monstrousness not just with logic and scientific investigations but imagination (as in art) and discipline (as in noble virtues, leading ultimately to a transhuman graduation of our species).

For instance, the theist believes that God exists. That belief is preposterous, and the arguments that would make it rational are fallacious, so reason doesn't support theism.

But what's the typical atheist's corresponding core belief, and is it rational? Suppose the atheist is a naturalist and a humanist. Naturalism (the view that there are no metaphysical miracles) is rational insofar as it's grounded in science, but that turns out to be not so meaningful because scientists have discovered that nature is profoundly counterintuitive. So, if by "rational" we mean something that conforms to ordinary, intuitive human reasoning, the naturalist's scientifically supported view of nature isn't rational.

Science popularizers like to conceal the cosmicist, horrific upshot of scientific theories by diluting them with archaic figures of speech such as the "laws of nature." Nature obeys no laws, according to scientific objectifications.

If by "rational" we mean scientific, then sure, scientific theories are rational. But the arcane mathematics and detachment needed to make sense of scientific discoveries of deep space and time stretch the human mind, so that nature ends up consisting of a host of virtual miracles. Think of black holes, quantum mechanics, and the strangeness of organic processes in a mostly lifeless universe. Those things are "natural" and "rational" in that scientists can explain "how they work." That is, scientists can model them without fully understanding them by reconciling human intuitions with the real patterns' cosmic enormity.

Humanism, too, isn't ultimately so rational, as I said. Instead of hoping for a deity to save us, we hope we can save ourselves from natural extinction. We do have some evidence that we can solve our problems with reason, but we have just as much evidence that we can spoil our progress and that reason itself can be used for ill. There's a leap of faith in either case.

Now, you might be thinking that this "So what?" response commits the tu quoque fallacy of distracting from theism's irrationality by charging the skeptic or atheist with hypocrisy. This would be fallacious only if the question of theism's rationality were important, which is precisely the question at issue. If all cultures are fundamentally irrational, there may be nothing so special about theism's irrationality, in which case the "So what?" response wouldn't be a fallacious distraction. On the contrary, the theist would concede that theism is irrational, and point out that such cultural irrationality is inevitable, citing secular cultural irrationalities as examples.

Indeed, this irrationality isn't so surprising because of the brain's evolved modularity. The brain consists of numerous systems that work independently, so there need be no coherent framework that reconciles their outputs. The attempt to find some such consistent synopsis of the brain's multifaceted outputs is just the laying out of a worldview or culture, and those products are bound to be irrational, to some extent, because the brain includes some "nonrational," illogical, or unscientific modules.

For instance, the brain has a genetically determined impulse to defend itself at all costs. Even if a brain would save the rest of humanity by sacrificing itself, the average brain wouldn't want to carry out that heroic act. The brain would feel it's unfair, and would search for alternatives because the human brain evolved from animals that are programmed to prioritize the survival of themselves, their offspring, or their group.

Hypocrisy is built into human cultures because culture attempts to square a circle. With cultures and worldviews, we attempt to rationalize the conflicting sides of our nature. Theistic religion is one such irrational overarching narrative, and materialistic consumerism, humanism, liberalism, or conservatism is another.

Or think of the hypocrisy involved in having an animal's sexual urges while being professionally obliged to adhere to civilized codes of propriety in public places. Again, hypocrisy and irrationality are baked into personhood because the latter runs on animal hardware. We mitigate that inner conflict with rationales that smooth the edges and distract us from the absurdity of our basic condition in life. We mentally compartmentalize to avoid cognitive dissonance.

But this has little to do with rigorous, scrupulous reason. Our behaviour may be instrumentally rational or prudent, but the goal of self-preservation is faith-based. We only trust that we deserve to live and to be happy.

The conventional conflict between atheists and theists ends with a rationalist standoff: the atheist shows that theism is irrational, and the theist resorts to sophistry to obfuscate the weakness of his or her existential convictions and traditional practices.

But that conflict is lame and pointless. The deeper conflict is aesthetic. Which side is liable to create the best art in the widest sense of "art," meaning any culturally meaningful product of the imagination? Has theistic culture become clichéd? Does that culture still inspire those who are most informed about the world, in the highly educated parts of developed societies, or do those populations tend to be more secular, so that they crave artistic greatness that has nothing to do with religious fictions?

Further reading

I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you'd like to have them handy and to support my writing. Some recent ones are The Torment of Cosmic Mindfulness, The Faltering Uplift of Intrepid Apes, Mirages in a Cosmic Wasteland, Our Oddity in Deep Time, Aristocrats in the Wild, and Questing for Epiphanies in a Haunted House, each of which is over 500 pages and filled with my articles on philosophy, religion, or politics.