“The motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone, but were impressed by an intelligent Agent.”
— Sir Isaac Newton, in a letter to Richard Bentley
“The more wonderful things [a person] discovers in the Works of Nature, the more auxiliary Proofs he meets with to establish and enforce the Argument… to evince That there is a God.”
— Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry
I am not the brightest bulb out there, and I know it. In our family of five, I have the lowest IQ. My wife and three adult children say, “NAH!! How do you know that?”
But methinks they protest too much. They make a fine show of assuring me that I am smart. But, IYKYK, right? (I am at least in the know with the current groovy online slang!) It’s true that I don’t have concrete empirical evidence that my IQ is not (as our president might say) YUGE! I mean, I faked my way through graduated from various schools. But my wife and kids are very smart and I have lived with them for quite a while, so I know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, my point here is that many people who are very, very smart have been enthusiastic theists, i.e., believers in God — many of them Christians. Many of them geniuses, polymaths, scientific innovators and literary luminaries.
Glass vs. driveway
Back to my dad. Oh, I haven’t mentioned my dad. Sorry. When I came home from college and revealed to him that I had decided to embrace the Christian faith, he was shocked and incredulous and mad. Our “conversation” migrated outside our house, where he smashed his martini glass on the driveway — such was his rage. He thought he had raised us “right” — that is to say, no church, no superstitions.
It took me quite a few years to really understand where Dad was coming from: if my naive kid had gone off to school and returned with a completely different understanding of Life, I would be distraught, too. I can appreciate now how Dad felt. As it turned out, the years softened his views; he saw that religious belief could be salutary; and, toward the end, he wrestled with God. I am not sure he ever crossed the line into theism. God is apparently content to leave me with ambiguity about that.
But I do remember well the piercing implication, when I was new to the faith, that Christian believers, in Dad’s experience, were generally lacking in intellect. One might have thought Dad had read Christopher Hitchens (“today, ancient stupidity is upon us again”) or Richard Dawkins.
*****
When I was writing a book-length explanation for why I became a Christian — just for Dad to read — I wrote about the high-IQ people I had met in my youthful experiences in church, including my first-ever pastor (the “Big Cranium man” I wrote about recently.). Which got me thinking about all the mega-intellects of history who were God-believers. History is full of them.
TAPTASP!
There are lots of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, but have you ever heard of “The Argument from Pervasive Theism Among Smart People”?
No, I guess not. I made it up. It occurred to me, as I wrote for Dad, that the Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Ontological Argument, and other pro-God arguments have been powerful for many people — including me. But man, I was impressed by the simple fact of TAPTASP — The Argument from Pervasive Theism Among Smart People. If some of history’s greatest intellects have concluded that theism makes the best sense of things, well…that’s saying something. Isn’t it?
Of course TAPTASP is no slam-dunk proof of God’s reality — you know, just because lots of brainy folks (see below) are on board with theism. It’s no slam-dunk….any more than another argument I feel is weighty, even though it’s been out of favor for a long time: the consensus gentium argument — i.e., “agreement of the people” — the idea that it’s significant that a large majority of people believe it.
(I think I would call this something more accessible than consensus gentium: maybe The Argument from Majority Opinion — TAMO!)
Now, of course, I’ve been around the block a few times, so I’m aware that “just because a lot of people believe it, that doesn’t make it true.” You bet.
But it’s not nothing. It’s possible that most people who’ve ever lived have had the most basic thing about life entirely wrong. True enough. But that’s not at all obvious: we should probably go slowly and deliberatively before dismissing the wisdom of untold billions of people on the subject of God. Indeed, if we judge by current surveys on belief, a vast majority of all those billions have been theists. It must mean something worth thinking about.
*****
Smart guys, then and now
“[Blaise] Pascal and [Rene] Descartes both decided, after reflection, that belief in God and Christianity was logical,” writes historian Daniel K. Williams of Ashland University in an extraordinary new work, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2026). He traces the reasoned defense of Christianity (what’s often called “apologetics”) from 17th century Puritan England to colonial America, from the reasonings of Newton and Boyle (see: the top of this article) and John Locke and Henry Hammond (author of Of the Reasonableness of the Christian Religion, 1649), to early America’s leading Calvinists (including Jonathan Edwards and the Founding Fathers Samuel Adams and John Witherspoon), to present-day Christian intellectuals (including Peter Kreeft, Nancy Pearcey and the late Tim Keller).
It was interesting to me how the England-to-USA arc bent back, from here to Britain, as the recent American apologists drew on the work of Chesterton, Tolkien and Lewis. Williams — a bright guy himself — also cites the influence of U.K. evangelicals like the mathematician John Lennox and the scientist-theologian Alister McGrath, both Oxford professors, and Rebecca McLaughlin, a Cambridge Ph.D in Renaissance literature.
The point for today being: antagonists from Voltaire to Nietzsche to, well, my Dad, have made sport of Bible-believers and other theists, claiming — contrary to all evidence — that you have to leave your brain at the door to believe. The truth is that many of history’s brightest lights — Bede, Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Maxwell, Planck, Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, and their pals (including my old astrophysicist-theologian professor Robert C. Newman) were people who looked up, and looked around, and looked within, and found that a contingent, wonderful universe was best explained by the existence of an intelligent, beneficent Creator.
Sometimes God's existence can be proved through the abundance of evidence found in the lives of those who boldly proclaim that God does not exist. Those folks find only temporary satisfaction in proclaiming their own human understanding (or misunderstanding) of the divine, while believers find eternal, indescribable joy in what is as hard to prove as it is to explain. Free will seems to provide its own justice.
'Our “conversation” migrated outside our house, where he smashed his martini glass on the driveway — such was his rage.'-Interesting. Your experience was opposite what is portrayed of college kids today. It's said that they go away to school and come back as woke monsters.