Smart people grow out of religion.

Question

Studies consistently show a negative correlation between religious belief and measures of intelligence and education. The most accomplished scientists — National Academy members, Nobel laureates — are overwhelmingly secular. Religious belief tracks with lower education, lower income, and lower scientific literacy. Whatever else religion is, it is a position that intelligent people increasingly find untenable.

G.K. Chesterton · Answer

The roster of Catholic intellectuals is the longest in history.

The argument requires us to overlook, by a strange selective amnesia, almost the entire intellectual history of the West. Augustine. Aquinas. Dante. Pascal. Descartes was a believer; so was Newton, who wrote more on theology than on physics; so was Mendel, who founded genetics from a monastery. Faraday, Maxwell, Kepler, Copernicus, Lemaître — the man who proposed the Big Bang was a Catholic priest. Twentieth-century philosophy alone gives us Wittgenstein, Anscombe, MacIntyre, Plantinga, Taylor. The historian who concludes that religious belief is incompatible with intelligence has stopped reading at his own century.

What the modern statistic actually measures is something narrower and less interesting: that in the contemporary West, in the last fifty years, the social class most identified with formal academic credentials has been disproportionately secular. This is a sociological fact about the modern academy, not a logical fact about religious belief. The same survey conducted in 1900, or 1500, or in any non-Western culture today, would produce a wildly different result. The atheist is mistaking a local weather pattern for a law of physics.

When the survey is done in five hundred years, after whatever the next civilizational upheaval turns out to be, we will see whether the correlation held or whether, like every previous prediction of religion's terminal decline, it dissolved on contact with history.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

I was an atheist because I assumed it was the intelligent position.

When I came up to Oxford as an undergraduate, I was a confirmed atheist on what I took to be impeccable intellectual grounds. The clever people I knew were atheists. The professors I admired were atheists. Christianity was the position held by people I considered my intellectual inferiors — country vicars, pious aunts, the unread. My atheism was, in significant part, a matter of social positioning rather than argument.

What converted me, very much against my will, was reading the people I had assumed were stupid. Chesterton turned out to be funnier and sharper than the modern essayists I admired. MacDonald turned out to do things in fiction that my professional contemporaries could not do. Above all, Tolkien — a Catholic philologist of formidable intellect, not the kind of man who could be safely dismissed as not having thought about it — turned out to hold his Christianity with a depth and rigor that put my unbelief to shame. The intellectual case I had assumed was on my side turned out to be considerably weaker than the case I had assumed was beneath my notice.

I now suspect that the modern correlation between unbelief and academic credentials measures something other than what its proponents assume. It measures the social formation of a particular professional class, in a particular century, in a particular set of institutions. The smart people I eventually came to know — Owen Barfield, Tolkien, Anscombe, Lewis the medievalist as opposed to Lewis the schoolboy atheist — were on the other side. The roster is not as one-sided as the survey suggests.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

The intellect's proper object is truth. Faith does not stand in its way.

The Catholic tradition has never opposed faith to intellect. It has, on the contrary, produced the most sustained intellectual tradition in human history — the medieval universities (Catholic foundations, every one), the scholastic method, the doctrine of the analogical predication of being, the integration of Aristotle, the development of natural law, the philosophy of person and act. The man who claims that faith is hostile to intellect has not read the Summa, which is structured as ten thousand objections taken seriously and answered.

What the modern survey calls "intelligence" is typically a narrow band of cognitive capacity — verbal facility, abstract reasoning, performance on standardized tests. This is a real human good, and the Church has cultivated it from her foundation. But it is not the whole of intellect, and its possession is not a guarantee of wisdom. The Pharisees were highly educated. So were the architects of modern totalitarianism. Intelligence in the narrow sense, separated from the orientation of the will toward the good, can produce monstrous results. The integration of intellect with virtue is what the tradition calls sapientia — wisdom — and it is what the saints possess and the merely clever often lack.

The genuine question is not whether intelligent people can be religious (they can, and have been, in immense numbers) but what intelligence is for. If it is for the pursuit of truth, then it cannot be hostile in principle to a religion that claims to be true. The compatibility has to be examined case by case, by the intellect itself.

The Logician · Answer

The argument is statistically illiterate.

The cited correlation is real but small, contested in its interpretation, and proves nothing of what the objection wants it to prove. A correlation between belief and education tells you about the social distribution of belief, not about the truth of belief. There was a time when the correlation ran the other way — when literacy and theological belief were near-universal among the educated and unbelief was the position of the marginally schooled. No one took this as evidence for Christianity then. No one should take the inverse correlation as evidence against it now.

The deeper error is the appeal to authority dressed as an appeal to demographics. Smart people believe X is a fallacy whether X is theism or atheism. Smart people have believed every major position in the history of ideas, including positions that turned out to be catastrophically wrong. Aristotle believed slavery was natural. Newton believed in alchemy. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Intelligence does not entail correctness, and correlations between intelligence and any given position do not function as arguments. They function as social signals.

If the objection were taken seriously as an argument, it would commit its proponent to whatever the contemporary intellectual class happens to believe at any given moment. This is not a posture compatible with intellectual seriousness. It is, in fact, the opposite of one.

Smart people grow out of religion.

The objection, in full

The roster of Catholic intellectuals is the longest in history.

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