If God is So Smart ...

Spirituality Column #173
March 2, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

If God is So Smart …
By Bob Walters

Who is smarter … us, or God?

The vast majority of humans – who in this bit of the conversation must necessarily and by definition believe God exists (if God doesn’t exist, neither does this conversation) – will likely concede that God “is smarter than me.”

Yet evidence suggests that culture and academia have long since concluded that sincere, experiential, active, sharing, evangelical belief in God disqualifies one from consideration of being a true intellectual.

In other words, God is smart; but if I say He is real, I must not be smart.

Spend a moment thinking that one over.

The rationalist non-believers may now enter into the conversation.

Late last year at the New School in New York City (Greenwich Village, Manhattan), the intellectual journal “n+1” convened a discussion panel on “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual.” The proceedings were august, thoughtful, deliberate … all very smart, liberal and intellectual.

It is quite telling that missing from the panel was even one evangelical intellectual, or any professing Christian. A Wall Street Journal commentary on the proceedings noted that all the panelists discussed their “move away from evangelical faith as a part of becoming intellectuals” which I believe infers they believe no evangelical intellectuals exist. Emotion is a disqualifying component.

And, it infers that a modern intellectual, necessarily and by definition, considers his mind to be superior to that of the necessarily non-real God’s.

When thoughtfully pressed to name someone both intellectual and Christian, the panel listed several, all of whom were liberal Catholics or Anglicans. Surprisingly, intellectually steeped Pope Benedict XVI wasn’t named, an omission that makes one doubt the intellectual weight of the exercise.

The underpinning of modern liberal intellectual thought, it would seem, is that no issue can ever be fully settled; hence, no truth can ever be known. And if you think an issue is settled, such as salvation through Jesus Christ, or that you know the truth … well, you can’t by definition be an intellectual.

Wouldn’t a true intellectual be thankful for the fact of the Creator God’s authorship of intellect, certainly a powerful sanction and purpose for intellectual endeavor? Yet the panel didn’t consider God sufficiently real to be intellectual.

The panel certainly was unwilling to profess that the truth of the Gospel – the saving grace of Jesus Christ – is God’s greatest and smartest truth.

Thinking one is smarter than God, I think, proves the opposite.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes intellect proceeds from God, and too often recedes from “intellectuals.”