If Intelligence Is God’s Gift, Why Is It Limited?
“The God of Israel… has given King David a wise son, endowed with intelligence and discernment.” (2 Chronicles 2:12)
Joseph Addison was an “academic” phenom in Aiyinase, a small Nzema town in western Ghana. By our last year in elementary school, there was no pretense of competition in the class standing, as he took first place in every subject. Azane-Kodwo tried, but he could only cement a reputation as the undisputed second-best student in our class. As I recall, a few others and I competed for a distant third in the rankings. But the sorting that mattered began with the application process to take the national common entrance examinations. This battery of tests determined which elementary students continued on to high school and which ones’ formal education ended in junior high.
The first step in the winnowing process involved purchasing registration forms that enabled aspiring high school students to take the all-important qualifying exams. The second was traveling to the nearest big city, Axim, and staying overnight in order to write the test early the following morning. But Addison did not procure the registration forms. His family could not afford them.
Many years later he confided to me that “Even if I had managed to get the forms, I would have had to sleep in the streets, as I had nowhere to lodge overnight in Axim.” Then, with a pained smile, added: “But why bother when the small subsistence family farm beckoned.” He resorted to, but failed at using dark humor, to explain how a potentially great mind was lost to a cassava farm. Both Azane and I would pass the big exams, survive high school, and make our respective journeys through college and post-graduate school. Addison, by far the better student, would sadly end his formal education at the elementary level.
Addison’s experience has haunted me through the years, leaving me wondering how he would have fared with similar educational opportunities such as Azane and I had. These are the twists of fate that bedevil our sometimes misguided certainties about a divine role in our lives. In this essay, I situate my classmate’s story as context in discussing a Christian thought—Providence—that we often presume is self-evident.
Religious people define Providence as an omniscient God’s benevolent “care” and “guardianship” in human affairs. The root word, provide, means to give. This signals a better direction for contemporary understanding and usage. Providence, in this sense, connotes giving, providing, taking care of. To the Christian, therefore, any good thing that happens in his/her life—health, prosperity, beauty, community regard, etc.—ultimately happens because God wills it. Such good happenings are therefore construed as part of God’s overall providential care.
The veracity of this supposition is often assumed and left uncontested because it appears unseemly in religious circles to question God’s benevolence. Nevertheless, thoughtful Christians have questioned the Providence concept. Is the idea that God maintains an overarching watch over us and does us good, a true transformative guiding principle we order our lives by? Or is it just a performative belief we subscribe to in polite Christian settings, because it’s an affirmation expected of us? Do we really believe that God actively oversees every person’s life experiences?
It sure seems so, judging by the overwhelming number of Christians who assert the efficacy of prayers, a widespread activity which is predicated on the assumption that God is a personal being who solicits, listens to, and answers individual and corporate petitions. It seems then that a religious person’s affirmation of prayer is close to an endorsement that God can alter our life courses for better, if we petition him the “right” way.
But, if God’s posture towards humans is thus narrowly singular and benevolent, why is there so much negative variability in our actual lived-experiences? Why is poverty, hunger, sickness, squalor, etc. so depressingly rampant, if all human lives are valued and superintended by a loving God who is dedicated to our good? The preponderant inequity in life’s good things, in a world supposedly under God’s watchful eyes, challenges this benevolent proposition. Isn’t it scandalous that there are so many places in this world where children routinely go to bed hungry? Juxtapose this gut-wrenching imagery against what regularly happens in some affluent communities, where excess food is dumped in trash cans, and life’s disparities sharpen.
Such basic needs inequality could be blamed on institutional behavior for long promoting and perpetuating this blight. But it bears pointing out that God is under no obligation to abide systems that allow children to suffer privations occasioned by human ineptitude. Wouldn’t an omniscient God who sees barely clad children scavenging in garbage dumps, prioritize their welfare, hear their unspoken prayers and feed, clothe, heal, and protect them?
Such asks of God could be thwarted by human selfishness or lack of cooperation, some argue. But since we postulate a God, who by definition is omnipotent and caring, it should be easily within his nature and capacity to solve the inequity problem, if he desires. One “simple” way a creator-God could level the playing field, so to speak, is at the cellular/genetic level. Here, God could endow all humans with a common “gift” most likely to help bridge, if not obliterate, the inequality gulf among humans. To this end, I can’t think of a trait more impactful than intelligence which, according to the writer of 2 Chronicles (2:12), God endows.
Throughout human history, intelligence —the possession, acquisition, and application of knowledge—has been a decisive difference-maker in the betterment of individuals and the societies they help create. Few will argue that intelligence, especially when coupled with opportunity, is priceless. An argument can be made that intelligence plus opportunity is the chief driver of most human advancement. The same couldn’t be said with much conviction for opportunity and idiocy.
But some individuals, and consequently their communities, are demonstrably “endowed” with more of this intelligence commodity than others. Intelligence Quotient tests are just formal confirmation of this discrepancy. But we’ve all been in classes and observed the ease with which some “get it” instantly, while others constantly struggle with the same material. Why is this so? It is the normalization of this situation, the postulation of a god who purportedly endows intelligence unequally, that I decry. Why should a providential God create people with such vast differences in intellectual capacity, knowing how pivotal brain power is to human well-being? What is the benefit, besides apparently playing favorites, of endowing some with more of this basic granular material, than others?
The availability of intellectual capacity largely accounts for much of human progress. Advances in both science and liberal arts are easily traceable to great minds in different communities and eras, which in turn have led to improvements in individual and community standards of living. That some individuals are born with more intelligence than others is not in doubt. What is also not in dispute is the fact that those born with more intelligence did nothing to “earn” it. This means that a child born “smart” is situated similarly to one born into riches: inheriting a genetic predisposition for intelligence, not for doing something meritorious, but for merely being born to parents with the right intelligence genes. Like a rich counterpart with all the advantages that money can provide, our smart-born child is likely to leverage their superior mind for future success in life, due to an “accident” of birth.
What is a child born with a subpar mind, who ends up in poverty, to make of this? The only consolation, a pyrrhic one at that, is to accept their lot as a consequence of randomness. But “No,” we protest, insisting they are a child of Providence. Yet we contend Providence is purposeful and discounts unpredictability. So, we circle back to why a providential God would seem to play favorites in apportioning the one resource most likely to aid in easing life’s burdens.
It is even worse when we are asked to believe that the same God sometimes “blesses” the Addisons of the world with extraordinary “native” intelligence, but still places them in environments where they are unable or incapable of capitalizing on their potential. It seems wasteful, if not outright cruel, that God would give Joseph Addison a potentially great mind but then surround him with such paralyzing poverty that it would stymie his academic capabilities. It’s sometimes hard to find a good reason for this, but we Christians find no shortage of ways to absolve God of this enigma. We cannot credit God for all the good things in life but ascribe life’s contradictions to the devil. We should not promote God as an absentee landlord who sets things in motion but leaves us to fend for ourselves. Tendering such a god calls his benevolence into question and cements the advantages of the privileged.
The point I’m trying to make is that we are sometimes too glib in attributing every positive happening in our lives to a god, but fail to hold these same gods answerable when the difficult times come. If God is in charge, then, to the degree we make him the harbinger of all good things, it should then be permissible in the same degree to question his guardianship, when things don’t measure up. If God indeed is in charge, it should also be allowable to question his rationale for the apparent uneven “allocation” of intelligence to humans, and the inequity that results from that action.
If he is not in charge, then the quarrel is not with God but may be with the “Moirai,” the alternative mythological blind fates who are believed to determine human destiny. My personal suspicion is that, with intelligence, impersonal genetics and not God or the fates, may be at its roots. And while it is true that thinkers and idiots die at the same rate, that fact does not argue for equivalence, nor should these two traits be deemed interchangeable. It is no choice if the bargain is between intelligence and all other traits, and any god who rations intelligence does the “idiot” no favors at all.
Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash
