I’ll start this answer by assuming belief in God is irrational. I’m not arguing that it is. I’m just trying to keep things simple.
If you want to understand human intelligence, you have to rid yourself of the myth that it’s monolithic. Is it weird to you that someone who excels at basketball might suck at golf or that a gifted painter might be bad at sculpting? We don’t generally think of physical and artistic skills as monolithic. We don’t think it’s odd that Paul McCartney isn’t great at writing classical symphonies. The exact same thing is true of any skills we think of as intellectual or rational. These are actually many skills, and everyone who excels at some of them is less-skilled (or not skilled at all) at others.
If you don’t understand or believe this basic truth, you will be forever baffled by how smart Sally can possibly believe irrational, crazy, stupid [whatever.] If you do understand how intelligence works, you won’t be surprised by that at all. You’ll expect it. You’ll expect it of every “smart person.”
The worst thing about believing intelligence is monolithic is that you’ll misjudge yourself. When you see you’re smart enough to understand X, you’ll assume you’re smart-enough to understand Y. You’ll also fall prey to the bogus political or health or whatever claims of a someone who is a genius physicist, wrongly making the assumption that if she’s smart enough to understand quantum mechanics, she’s smart enough to understand anything.
One thing we know from neuroscience is that there’s no “self” center of the brain. We do not have fixed personas. That is an illusion. We are a tornado of ever-changing sensations, impulses, emotions, and thoughts. No one is “simply smart” (or “simply good” or “simply creative” …) That’s a caricature.
Whether God actually exists or not, there are a huge number of social and psychological pressures to develop belief. If you think that intelligence is necessarily a match for those pressures, that’s scary. It’s scary because it means you believe that if you can get yourself to be sufficiently rational, you can overcome your irrationality. This is an extremely anti-scientific view. Science is a series of checks and balances that are in place to cope with the inevitable irrationality of scientists. It is a system that is profoundly against putting trust in the rationality of any individual human or group of humans.
We know that rational processes are calorically expensive. We did not evolve to keep them up all the time. Rather, we evolved to use them in short bursts. While this isn’t always conscious (or subject to will), people are circumspect about when they apply rationality and when they don’t. If someone is not heavily invested in the “God is imaginary vs God is real” debate, she may not exhaust her limited supply of rationality there, but, rather, into something like scientific research or writing instead.
There’s a certain kind of person—usually someone who has either been horribly hurt by religious people or someone who has been horribly hurt by atheists—who can’t imagine anyone not being involved in that debate (or not caring much about it), but, in fact, most people (smart or not) aren’t. The people who are tend to congregate in fighty pockets of the Internet and come to feel like those pockets are the entire world.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning spiritual experiences. There are real experiences that people have—that people have had in every culture throughout history. Not everyone has them (I never have), but large numbers of people do. I am not suggesting anything about the cause of these experiences (if it matters, I’m an atheist), but the experiences themselves happen, and they can be potent and persistent. If someone has an enduring experience for years or decades of her life, her brain (smart or not) has to account for it somehow. So her brain will account for it somehow.
You may be in a position to make a logical argument about God (pro or con), but unless you’ve had these experiences—overpowering ones—and unless you’ve had them for years and years, you are not in a position to say how you’d react or what you’d believe if you did. I’ve met atheists who have had spiritual experiences they’ve shrugged off, but I’ve yet to meet one that has such experiences every day for decades and who has remained an atheist. If they exist, they are not numerous.
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