For this post, I’m piggy-backing off of an interesting discussion that Brad Brock called my attention to this week. Here’s an excerpt from the blog of Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist:

This will look like a rhetorical question, but it’s not. I’m still trying to figure out how religious people interpret their environment. Here’s something that has always puzzled me.You’ve probably seen the studies showing that the smarter you are, and the more you know, the less likely you are religious. The studies are usually expressed in terms of education. High school dropouts are more religious than people who finished graduate school, etc.

We’re talking averages here. Obviously there are plenty of smart, educated religious people. But on the whole, the more you know, the less likely it is that you will buy into a religion. The correlation is quite striking.

This squares with my own observations. When I encounter extra-smart people who are also religious, I tend to ask a lot of questions trying to find out why. What I have discovered is this: Under my special powers of interrogation, the extra-smart religious people almost always admit (privately) that their religion is more of a choice than a perception. In other words, for the extra-smart, the concept of God exists, and that concept benefits their lives, independent of any literal truth. It’s a lot like being an atheist while keeping the benefits of being religious. That’s exactly the sort of extra-smart solution you would expect from extra-smart people.

My puzzlement is over the question of how the true religious people interpret the fact that the smartest and most educated people in the world are, on average, far less religious. These are the explanations I can think of:

1. There is no correlation between intelligence/education and religion. Where do you get you so-called “facts” cartoon boy?

2. Religion comes from the heart, not the head. I missed the biology class that says the heart is just a blood pump.

3. God doesn’t like intelligent/educated people so he wants fewer of them in heaven.

4. I didn’t know about that intelligence/education/religion correlation. But now that I do, I renounce my religion!

5. What’s an “average”?

Can the believers among you tell me if I left anything off the list?

If you want to look at some of the 495 comments made that day, you can find them here. (Adams also has a follow-up post here.) But I’d like to throw open a question that Adams touches on: How do you, personally, reconcile your Christian beliefs with being an educated critical thinker?

To start the conversation, here’s what I posted after most of the discussion was done:

I think intellectuals resist being lumped in with non-critical thinkers who make silly claims (religious or otherwise) that don’t hold water. I know I do. And it must be admitted that Christians say some pretty silly (and at times even evil) things.For me, though, the strongest argument in favor of Christianity does not start with theological claims but with the life of Jesus. A critical thinker can pick apart a theological argument about Jesus, but to consider that someone would love his enemies, turn the other cheek to those who would kill him, befriend the whores and lepers of society, claiming that they are the ones God wants a relationship with, and be crucified –– that’s enough to undo just about anyone. (And however skeptical you might be about the four gospels, this much of the depiction of Jesus is historically sound, even from a secular standpoint; if he existed at all, he clearly helped the marginalized and died on a cross.)

As an intellectual who is still a believer, I believe that the life Jesus lived undergirds Christian claims that he was the Son of God –– indeed God himself. If God were to become human, I think Jesus is who he would be. That, and the fact that a strong historical argument can be made for the resurrection (as long as you don’t rule it out a priori on naturalistic grounds) are enough to keep me a believer.