A Stephen Gordon of Utah submits a letter to the 11/2005 Discover magazine:
Well. Let's trot out a roster of those uneducated idiots: Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kant, Locke, Dostoyevsky, Galileo, Newton, Brahe, Boyle, Aggassiz, Faraday - we could go on, but you get the point. Perhaps Mr. Gordon would scoff and say that these are all pre-twentieth century thinkers, and that it was easier to believe back in their day than it is in ours. We might ask him, if we dare, why that is so. What do we know today that makes belief in God impossible for any but an idiot or an ignoramus? We should not hold our breath waiting for an answer to that one.
In any event, it doesn't matter whether or not Mr. Gordon has an answer for us since the basic assumption that only the mentally defective or uneducated can believe in God in the modern era is quite at variance with the facts. Let's take a look at just a few of those whose intellects are of the first rank and who also believe that God exists (and may even believe some of those other things Mr. Gordon contemptuously dismisses as well): Pope John Paul, George Marsden, Mark Noll, William Lane Craig, Karl Barth, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, William Dembski, Os Guiness, Richard Swinburne, C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, J.R.R. Tolkein, Carl Henry, William Buckley, John Stott, Reinhold Neibhur, Alistair MacIntyre, Antonin Scalia, Richard Neuhaus, John Polkinghorne et multi, multi plus.
Among the scientists so esteemed by Mr. Gordon, as many of them believe today as believed a century ago, and the number of believing scientists is about the same as the number of their skeptical colleagues (see here, for instance).
Mr. Gordon may not be familiar with these names, but then one probably needs a modicum of education to be acquainted with them. Perhaps Mr. Gordon is indeed conversant with many of them but thinks them mere pygmies in comparison with his own intellectual gifts, and they may be. It's hard to say because, although I've heard of these Christian intellectuals and read their work, Mr. Gordon has till now escaped my notice, doubtless to my detriment. Consequently, I'm unaware of his scholarly credentials which must surely be impressive.
