THEOLOGY & APOLOGETICS

Are Atheists Smarter than Christians?

| All Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | footnotes

Who's Right?

Who's correct as to why there are very smart people who don't believe in God and highly intelligent people who do? Freud? Marx? The writers of Scripture? Someone else?

As a Christian, I obviously believe what the Bible teaches, but that wasn't always the case. Although I knew about Jesus and had heard His statement, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength" (Mark 12:30), I couldn't have cared less. I had absolutely zero affection for the things of God.

But that all changed at age nineteen for me. God had mercy on me, reached down and opened my heart just like Lydia's so that I would accept the teaching of Bible prophecy that I began studying at that time and the testimony about Christ, which God was using as a secondary cause to bring me to Him.

I'm certainly not the smartest person in the world, but I'm no intellectual laggard either. Once I didn't believe, but now I do. Is an atheist smarter than me because he doesn't believe or am I smarter than him because I do?

No.

I'm a Christian because God revealed Himself to me, used reasonable and evidential means to bring me to Him, and changed my spiritually dead mind so that today I can say with Paul, "We have the mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16).

1. Matt Purple; "Religion Must be Destroyed, Atheist Alliance Declares"
2. Bill Maher: Christians have Neurological Disorder"
3. Will M. Gervais, Ara Norenzayan; "Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief"
4. Rob Brooks; "Analytic Thinking Erodes Religious Belief"
5. Ibid.
6. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), pgs. 47,49.
7. Ibid.
8. "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction," in On Religion, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, tr. Reinhold Niebuhr (Chico, CA: Scholar's Press, 1964), pp. 41-2.
9. Richard Dawkins video
10. Nora Barlow, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958), pg. 87.
11. C.S. Lewis; Case for the Christian Faith

Image Credit: Chris Wieland; "Reason Rally"; Creative Commons

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Published 9-17-12