Why Christianity is hard to believe

It’s a fact that brilliant people believe in Christianity. And it’s also a fact that brilliant people do not.

For example, A.C. Grayling, a high-IQ British philosopher and historian, sits squarely in the unbeliever camp, saying in his book The God Argument, “The cumulative case against religion shows it to be a hangover from the infancy of modern humanity”. Then you have Michael Faraday, the eminent English chemist and physicist who contributed vastly to the study of electrochemistry and electromagnetism, who said: “The book of nature, which we have to read, is written by the finger of God.”

So, what can we conclude from the reality that really smart people both believe and don’t believe? I’d say one takeaway is that there’s more at play than just raw intelligence when it comes to receiving Christ.

I’m certainly not the first person to point this out. Sigmund Freud, for example, asserted that Christians are primarily motivated by life-after-death desires and said such hopes are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.”

Philosopher Aldous Huxley in Ends and Means admitted his motivation for disavowing Christianity when he wrote: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning … for myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” 

So, while insults about being “dumb” are commonly hurled around in God arguments, the truth is there are many non-intellectual motivating factors at work that move a person either towards or away from God. But there’s more underneath the covers when it comes to why one person receives the Gospel while another declines, especially since the evangelistic message itself can be, shall we say, prickly.  

Figuring that out would cause me to continuously scratch holes in my head if the Bible didn’t clearly tell us why it happens.

The anatomy of belief and unbelief

It’s a fact that the Bible itself admits the Gospel of Christ is hard to believe.

If you’re a skeptic of Christianity and think its teachings don’t add up, there you go — even the Bible backs you. But you probably won’t agree with the two reasons why Scripture says that is.

First up is the picture the Word paints of how all of us come into this world and our initial spiritual state. The Bible says we enter life “dead in [our] trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), which means we’re askew from the start where God is concerned. That results in spiritual brainpower that’s in constant rebellion against God and morally unable to believe the gospel, just as Paul says: “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so” (Rom. 8:6–7).

Scripture says we have a “reprobate mind” (Rom. 1:28), one that is void of any ability to make right choices towards God. In his work The Enchiridion, Augustine says we have no freedom of will with this kind of mind to move toward God whatsoever: “When man by his own free-will sinned, then sin being victorious over him, the freedom of his will was lost.”  

We’re still free to make choices, of course, but we choose poorly because we’re chained to unrighteous thinking. Calvin describes it as having unhealthy self-determination: “Man, when placed under this bondage, [was] deprived not of will, but of soundness of will”.

That “unsoundness” is why Jesus told his detractors they couldn’t respond to what He was telling them about Himself: “Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word” (John 8:43). If they had “heard” it, Paul says, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8).  

That’s strike one.

Strike two is the message of the Gospel itself, which the Bible describes like this: “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

Paul goes on to contrast the anatomy of belief and unbelief and highlight that acceptance only comes about through God’s effectual call on a person:

“For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:21–24).

One group, Paul says, dismisses the Gospel. Another group made up of the same kinds of people accepts it. Why? Paul answers that question by saying, “…by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30, my emphasis).

It’s by “His doing” because the message of the cross stands in stark contrast to every other religion in the world that is works-based, which is a system that clicks with us whether we like the idea of it or not. Do good, get good; be bad, get bad.

But not the Gospel.

Tim Keller says the radical message of Christ that runs counter to that can be hard to accept on whichever side of the fence an unbelieving person is on: “Grace is insulting. One side says they don’t need forgiveness whereas the other side says that’s too easy.” G. K. Chesterton said the same thing about the latter when he wrote, “What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true.”

What about you?

Maybe you’re a really smart person. Maybe you’ve said yes to Christ. Maybe you’ve said no.

Either way, it’s not because of your mental powers. In his book, Hard to Believe, John MacArthur flatly states: “Human intellect plays no role in redemption.”

Scripture affirms what he says by putting it this way: “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Cor. 12:18).

Again, brilliant minds have landed on both sides of Christianity for centuries. The Bible says the difference isn't IQ, but whether God has called a person and graciously opened their eyes to the “foolish” message of the cross, which is the wisdom of Christ.

If that hasn’t happened to a person, then yes, to them, Christianity is definitely hard to believe.