Misconception N.O2 Christians Are Stupid

This is a word for word conversation I had with a ‘friend,’ who I will not name to protect their anonymity. 

Me: P (mutual acquaintance) told me he grew up in a Christian family. 

Friend: Well, I think his mum was Christian but not his dad as he was a physicist. 

And a physicist can’t possibly be a Christian because physicists are clever, and anyone who has a rational explanation for the mechanisms behind life on earth couldn’t possibly believe in a creator God, could they? 

The assumption is that Christians are a bit stupid. Like children, spiritually and intellectually immature, believing in a fantasy man in the clouds because they lack the brain capacity to truly grasp what’s really going on. As Comedian George Carlin said ‘religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man who watches everything you do.’ 

I’ll leave the point about spiritual immaturity for a later post, but for this one, I’ll address the misconception that Christians are stupid. 

Here are a few intelligent Christians; 

Francis Collins, PHD is a physicist who was head of the Human Genome Project. He is the author of The Language of God; A Scientist presents evidence for belief. 

Alister McGrath is a Northern Irish theologian who holds a doctoral degree in molecular biology and a doctor of divinity in theology, amongst other academic qualifications. He has written a number of books including The Dawkin’s delusion which refutes Richard Dawkin’s ‘The God Delusion.’ 

John Lennox is a professor of Mathematics at Oxford university who has written books on the interface of science, philosophy and religion. 

I could go on. There are many more examples. 

Dr. Sy Gart is a biochemist who actually came to faith through science. In an interview, he said, ‘it just seemed that the idea that evolution explained everything in life was just too glib, too easy, it didn’t seem like enough. There are too many things that are too difficult to explain through chemical evolution.’ 

Gart wrote his book, ‘The Work Of His Hands: A scientist’s journey from Atheism to Faith,’ because he felt called to explain how science and faith are completely compatible. 

Since the idea that Christians are stupid people looking for a non-scientific explanation for life is completely inaccurate, where did it come from? 

I have a hunch that Satan has it’s hand on it. Satan knows that flattery is the way to seduce people, and what better way to seduce intelligent types than to create a narrative where believing in a creator God is the height of stupidity. 

Books like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins perpetuate the myth that intelligent, rational people are not so delusional to believe in a silly thing like God. It shuts down people’s intellectual curiosity because who wants to be labelled as stupid? 

What Gart points out in his interview, is that people are so eager to cling onto the non-existence of a God that some atheist scientists are starting to deny reality. ‘’Atheists are starting to say, no no, the universe didn’t have a beginning, it’s been there forever. No, no DNA is not a real code. And the reason is that they are attacking scientific facts that are pointing more and more to what they don’t want to know, that the world has a creator. 

Why would scientists be so keen not to believe in the Christian creator God? Perhaps it is because of this heavy ‘flattery programming’ that makes them want to resist at all costs taking a stance that would be seen as irrational by fellow scientists. Perhaps it’s because Christianity is portrayed as being so negative in so much of our media. 

We are inundated with so much anti-Christian messaging in our society, that it can be very hard to rationally think through the question ‘is the Christian God real?’ And no amount of PHD’s in science subjects makes people immune to brainwashing. 

What it takes is the opposite, a sense of humility, a sense of openness, and often it can be harder to enter into a state of humility when there are achievements and accolades clouding your view. 

As Jesus chastises the religious leaders, the pharisees. ‘Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him.’ (Matthew 21: 31-32) The Pharisees had all that religious training, but they were so attached to it, they weren’t able to see that Jesus truly was the Son of God. 

As Jesus said, ‘But many who are first will be last, and the last first.’ (Matthew 19:30)  

So no, Christians aren’t stupid. There’s just some extremely clever cultural conditioning at play to make you think that.