I think to say that we are no smarter than previous generations is a bit naive. I would say a human by itself, no matter when it exists, is pretty dumb. But mankind now compared to mankind 1000 years ago... is there really a comparison? It is not by any merit of our own that we are smarter, we've just inherited more intelectual information.
Think of the brain as a muscle... the more use it gets, the stronger it gets. Our brains are much more active today then they were 1000 years ago, the accumulated knowledge is vast in comparison. We are much smarter, not because we are better, but because we have been given the right tools to make us so. I would hope that 100 years from now that people would be smarter than us now... a lot smarter.
It's so tempting for us as christians to nullify science in our minds, to discredit scientists. I think this is one of the greater errors of the church in all of it's existance. If we were more willing to embrace knowledge from places other than our pulpits, we might of been able form the scientific community to not as threatening towards faith, but to actually support faith. The more we ignore facts that smart people have discovered, the less we look like truth-bearers and more like brain-washed lemmings.
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"the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation"
2 Peter 3:15
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