With all the debate about Intelligent Design, I started to wonder if intelligence is overrated. In particular, are intelligent people happier than unintelligent people?
If you were to rank the following two hypothetical individuals by happiness, what order would you put them in?
- Bob the dentist
- Snowflake the dog
Dentists are generally pretty smart and they have the highest suicide rate of any profession. In stark contrast, dogs are goofy and they always look happy. You almost never hear about a dog trying to shoot himself.
I know you want me to make a joke along the lines of “Dentists would be happy too if they could lick themselves.” But this is a serious discussion and I won’t have it. Plus that’s why dentists have office assistants.
Anyway, if intelligence doesn’t help make you happy, what good is it?
You might argue that survival of the species is a good enough reason for intelligence. After all, most people prefer being alive even if the highlight of their day is hosing the shareholders by reading The Dilbert Blog on company time.
I think you’ll agree that the usefulness of intelligence in humans is that it improves the odds of survival. We need all the help we can get. But this raises an even more interesting question.
Why would God need to be intelligent?
And by intelligent, I mean in some fashion that people recognize. For example, right now I’m using my intelligence to write this blog entry while eating a delicious meal at my restaurant. There’s an ex-employee eating lunch across the room and I’m worried that she’ll say, “Hi Scott” and then I’ll say, “Hi…you there.” I’m already planning to exit out of the kitchen so I don’t have to walk in her direction. And this is a good example of something that God would not be worrying about.
In fact, I can’t think of a single thing that my intelligence helps me do during the day that God would also need to do. I’m reasonably sure that the same could be said of you.
If God exists, and he has intelligence, I feel safe in saying that it’s entirely different from the sort of intelligence that people have. He wouldn’t need intelligence to make him happy, and he has no risk to his survival, so what type of intelligence would an omnipotent being possess?
To answer that question, let’s start with the overblown human definition of intelligence and subtract out all of the things God doesn’t need. First, throw out all the human intelligence associated with desire, greed, sex, fear, frustration, politics, scheming, remembering quotes from Monty Python, and anything else that has no purpose for God.
Now get rid of love as humans understand it because that’s obviously the opposite of intelligence. I don’t mean that in a cynical way. I mean that if you could “think yourself” into falling in love, you’d be doing more of that and less falling in love with the Safeway cashier who you keep forgetting is paid to act friendly.
We’re not done yet.
What about consciousness? You’d expect God to be conscious as we understand it, right? But that wouldn’t make sense for an omnipotent being. Our own consciousness is mostly about imagining what can happen next and comparing it to what does so we can adjust accordingly. That’s useful for survival, but only for slow procreating creatures that are made of meat and surrounded by carnivores. God wouldn’t need that sort of imagination because omnipotence means your preferences are the same as reality. There’s no point in being almighty if you have to sit around imagining what you want and then waiting for it. So God would have no use for consciousness.
All that’s left of intelligence that is consistent with an omnipotent God is the ability to do complex things. That might not be part of the definition of intelligence in your dictionary, but it should be. Allow me to explain by analogy.
A baby is not the same as the adult it later grows into. Yet we consider them to be the same person. Where do you draw the line between the early form of something and what it later becomes? It’s mostly a point of view. There’s no objective way to decide. I choose to define any process that can create intelligence as the initial phase of that intelligence. That seems perfectly fair to me.
And here’s where it gets interesting, in case you wondered when.
Atheists believe that our existence is the result of matter and energy bumping around according to the laws of physics. In other words, the universe has the ability to do complex things. The universe is intelligent in precisely and exclusively the way an omnipotent God would be, according to me, your source of all useful knowledge.
But what about design? Atheists say the universe was built without the need for design. I think it’s worth noting that if humans could build great things without the need for user specifications and written plans, we’d do it that way too. So when we impose the need for human-like design processes on an omnipotent being, we’re selling God short. He’d do it his own way. And that might involve a relatively short list of physical laws, a bunch of matter, and a lot of space-time.
If you accept that God’s design process wouldn’t mean the same as human design processes, and intelligence for God doesn’t mean the same as intelligence for humans, then it’s hard to argue against Intelligent Design. Rationally defined, both intelligence and design – when applied to an omnipotent being – look exactly like the laws of nature, and no one doubts that those exist.
All that’s left then is the question of God’s existence.
Yes, I will be answering that question here. That’s why you came to the Dilbert Blog, isn’t it?
God, by any definition, is not part of our natural world. He’s above it, whatever that means. And yet he exerts an all-powerful force upon it. What do we all know from our common experience that meets that test?
Concepts.
Allow me to explain again by analogy. We believe that love exists, yet it is little more than the sum of the biology and situation that evoke it. Love itself is simply an umbrella concept that contains all of those chemical reactions and environmental happenings. Love is supernatural in that sense, as all concepts are.
Even the biggest atheist would agree that God exists as a concept. And that concept is undeniably the most powerful one in existence. It influences virtually every human activity from procreation to war.
The universe, by definition, is comprised of all the matter and energy and the rules that hold it all together. In sum, those things form a concept that atheists say created the earth and all its creatures.
Is this concept of the universe – some might call it God – both intelligent and a designer? That depends entirely upon how you define those terms. I can’t bring myself to believe in a God with a personality like my own. I base that on the paucity of lightning attacks on people who deserve it. But intelligence and design look like qualities that exist in the universe to everyone’s satisfaction if you strip out the unnecessary parts. If someone wants to call that God, I say Merry Christmas.