Brilliant Minds

As I have noted before, there is a newly aggressive atheism and anti-Christian movement afoot in the U.S. Jennifer, who is a converted atheist, just had an interesting post after seeing some books by this bunch at the local Barnes & Noble.

I can't call them out too much since I used to be one of these people. But what jumps out to me about these sorts of statements now is the lack of wonder and curiosity about what made such a large percentage of the great minds of history believe in God or some sort of other spiritual realm.

Socrates, Plato, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Michelangelo, Einstein, and all the other brilliant minds who believed in the soul, in God or gods, in a designed universe: these people were not idiots. They also don't strike me as delusional, irrational, or the type of people to unquestioningly swallow fairy tales just because it was their culture or the way they were raised. And though they didn't have electron microscopes or the Hubble telescope, they had good heads on their shoulders when it came to understanding the world and weren't timid wallflowers who feared questioning things. I really doubt that any of these men believed in a "God of the gaps," where they decided that God must exist simply because they didn't know where the stars came from. Many of them are the founders of the modern sciences that we prize so much today. I can't picture any one of them reading The God Delusion or God: The Failed Hypothesis and renouncing their beliefs after being dizzied by the intellects of Dawkins and Stenger. MORE

Well said. Militant atheists would have us believe that only simpletons with IQ scores below room temperature can believe in a silly concept like "God." It isn't so, as Jen explains. This is not to say that Christians have a monopoly on scientific knowledge. Without a theological foundation of some kind, however, most of science doesn't make much sense. At the end of the day, we all believe in a God. The only question is which God we choose to accept.