Reason and Irrationality

Andrew Seddon has an essay at the New Oxford Review in which he talks about the beliefs of Christians and atheists and makes the claim that, though atheists allege that theism is literally incredible, what the atheist believes is certainly no less so. Here's part of his essay:

While undeniable that Christianity entails a belief in the supernatural, the miraculous — God became man that first Christmas, Christ raised people from the dead, rose himself on the first Easter Sunday and ascended into heaven 40 days later — consider what atheists believe.

They believe that something came out of nothing, that reason came from irrationality, that a complex universe and natural order came out of randomness and chaos, that consciousness came from non-consciousness and that life emerged from non-life.

This is a bridge too far for the Christian for whom faith and reason tell him that for all of this to have been created from nothing is absurd; it presupposes a Creator.

Atheists believe, Seddon writes, that “a multiverse (for which there is no experimental or observational evidence) containing an inconceivably large number of universes spontaneously created itself.”

He doesn't mention, but could have, that many atheists also believe that life has meaning even though death cancels everything out; that moral duties exist, even though there's no basis for them; that reason is reliable, even though evolution only conserves traits that promote survival, not truth; that love is meaningful and that beauty is inspiring, even though both of these are simply the result of neurochemical reactions in the brain; that people are responsible for their choices even though those choices are predetermined by their genes and environment; and that human beings have worth and rights even though such valuations are completely arbitrary and rooted in nothing but the appraisal of others.

Despite holding a collection of beliefs grounded in nothing more than their subjective preferences they assure us that they are the rational people, the "brights" in Daniel Dennett's famously pompous description, and that theists are, by implication, dim-witted boobs. Yet theists recognize that none of the beliefs listed in the preceding paragraphs make any sense at all unless they're grounded in an objective, intelligent, personal, transcendent cause.

That recognition alone makes theism rationally superior to any view, like naturalistic atheism, which holds that the personal can emerge from the impersonal, that complex information can emerge from chaos, or that nothing can produce something.