Intelligence of the Ancients

         I once got into a very heated debate with a friend of mine who thought that we were more intelligent, these days, then the people in ancient times. I couldn't help but ask him if he considered himself more intelligent than the likes of Socrates or Plato. This was meant to be a rhetorical question, but to the rolling of my eyes, after looking up Socrates, and having discovered that believed thoughts originated in our chest cavity, he concluded that he was in fact smarter than Socrates.  

As frustrating as I found this discourse between he and I, I also learned something from it; a lot of people confuse knowledge with intelligence, and this has instilled a false sense of pride in people living in the modern age.

Firstly, knowledge is defined as information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, and intelligence as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. I would like to think that by defining the terms my point becomes clear, but I just can't "define and dash," so I will attempt to illustrate my point more perspicuously.

Let's for a minute put ourselves in the shoes of the ancients, say the same time as Socrates, in and around 450 BC. Human intelligence has not evolved since this period – I would even argue it has taken a few steps back on the species as a whole – and so you would be you, accept of course you would be you as you would be if you were born a fifth century BC Greek. You would be subject to the cultural milieu of where you would be born, but you would still be you. Here is the question to ask yourself: would you consider yourself an idiot? Well of course not! Just because you lack the knowledge of the modern age doesn't mean you are stupid. Available to you are all the cognitive faculties that you posses now. Think about it, you are no more intelligent than they were, the only thing that has changed is the knowledge that surrounds you, not your intelligence, this is something we as humans cannot change. This is the fundamental difference between knowledge and intelligence.

To address the second half about the misunderstanding of knowledge and intelligence and it's relationship to a false sense of pride amongst people living in the modern age, I offer two questions: (1) Did we all wake up one morning knowing what we now know today, and (2) are we still human?

Both questions have easy answers, “no” to the former and “yes” to the latter. What I am trying to illustrate with the first question should be obvious and found within the definition of knowledge. We did not come to our present knowledge of the world and it's inner workings by rolling out of bed one day and it all being there for us, it has built upon the shoulders of giants. From Newton to Einstein to Hawking, all of these men had equals from by gone eras whose successes and mistakes helped to shape what we know today. Moreover, take into consideration how brilliant the people must of been who first figured out how to write, or make clay pottery, or discovered the smelting process, or architecture. Do you think you could have figured that stuff out on your own? I doubt I could have, and I know I am no idiot.

The point of the second question is that people are people regardless of what era we live in and as such we are truly no different than those of us who are alive today. That is the false sense of pride, just because we have their knowledge to reflect on, does not mean we are more intelligent than were, as a matter of fact, we are not.

There is a religious significance to what I am saying here. You can say that people from a bygone era were more superstitious than us, but I say they just didn't know where nature ended and super-nature began. These days the lines are much more clear, but you shouldn't have a false sense of pride because our knowledge of the natural world somehow means the supernatural doesn't exist, science can't touch that, only your presuppositions can. Six billion of us believe in a God, even with all the knowledge of our natural world we posses today. There is something more to belief in God than objective evidence. It is not just some mechanism that we use to connect the dots in the knowledge that we don't yet posses. It is something we feel, something we have always felt and those people who lived back then were the same as you and I who live today. They couldn't explain it either, but they knew it was real, they same as us who believe today. Reflect on that.

In Christ

P.L.