On Very Smart People Not Being Christian

 

Matters of God are different to all other matters in a number of ways. One remarkable way is that intelligence is a poor predictor of getting the God questions right, especially the question of accepting Christ as Lord and Saviour.

For example, if a very smart computer scientist disagrees with your theory about the time complexity of your sorting algorithm, you should probably look into it more; if a very smart astronomer disagrees with your theory about the composition of Saturn’s rings, you should probably look into it more; if a very smart economist disagrees with your interpretation of the Laffer curve, you should probably look into it more; and if a very well informed Tudor historian disagrees with your take on the causes of the English Reformation, you should probably look into it more. But very smart people of this calibre, even people who probably wouldn’t get a lot wrong in most empirical subjects, frequently get the big God question monumentally wrong, and come to entirely the wrong conclusions about many of the most important questions in existence. There are clear reasons why, which I’ll explain in a moment – but I think it is a peculiar anomaly in the intellectual landscape of human consideration.

What lies at the heart of this strange and consistent aberration across many very smart minds, even some highly brilliant ones? Why does the highly competent astronomer, so precise in calculating the orbital path of a newly discovered exoplanet or pinpointing the cause of unusual dimming in a distant star, and the computer scientist with a masterful grasp of the validity of a proof about P vs. NP or the scalability limits of a distributed system, go so far off course when faced with the most important question of all – accepting Christ as Lord and Saviour?

It’s obviously a complex and multifaceted set of reasons – and, of course, the most intuitive answers are that, at the heart level, 1) people only believe what they want to believe; 2) the answer to this question is primarily an emotional response; 3) there is a reluctance to submit to a God who requires our humility and repentance to see the truth; and 4) there is unwillingness to give up certain superficial or hedonistic habits or ways of life that faith in Christ would require revising or abandoning.

And I think they are all satisfactory pretexts for why many very smart people remain wrong on the biggest question – the one regarding their own salvation. But I think it does remain peculiar even at the intellectual level, because very smart minds have the cognitive artillery and resources to arrive at a similar conclusion themselves, not just about the truth of Christ as a proposition on the table, but about their own process map and potential areas of improvement for arriving at the right conclusion.