God. Real. Right.

Warning: this post contains dangerously opiatic speculation about truth and intelligence. It is an effort to clarify for myself what I see as a misguided feature of some hermeneutics, some apologetics, and much if not most skepticism. But it simply will not be interesting to people with real lives!
Intelligence can mean many different things: for example, the mental ability to comprehend things, the essential element of a purposive existence, and the ability to perform computer functions. This explanation uses the first definition, the mental ability to comprehend. So the level of intelligence refers to the capacity of a given person to comprehend something at a given time. The given time is important because it is beyond doubt that mental capacity is variable within a person over time. (For instance, the more a person memorizes, the greater becomes that person’s ability to memorize.)
Truth can also be defined many different ways, only one of which has any real meaning. So while authors can define truth as coherence, pragmatics, or semantics, none of those definitions accepts that truth really is something. And although those who think about it know that defining truth as correspondence has a very serious unsolved problem associated with it, it is still the only definition of truth which actually acknowledges that truth is something real. For this explanation, then, truth is a whole system of relations arising when a person’s mental grasp of a fact corresponds with the fact itself.
Many authors and arguers, particularly skeptics, have the obnoxious habit of crediting their currently held opinion to their presumably superior intelligence. There are certainly authors who avoid making this mistake, and who are therefore already prepared for a real discussion at the level of this explanation’s conclusion, but the presumed directly proportional relationship between intelligence and skepticism makes the point.
Now suppose truth is taken as curve on a Cartesian Plane, a two-dimensional x-y axis. And suppose intelligence is needed to see that curve in the plane. As with any analogy, it is important not to confuse what the analogy represents. The curve is not information–not simply fact. It is the set of relationships defined above as truth. Part of the point of this entire argument is that a person can easily see facts and ignore the truth. So intelligence is necessary for grasping the truth, but not sufficient.
The issue for the moment is that truth is not simply two-dimensional. While any given set of relations (truth) between a set of facts and a person’s grasp of them may be present in a plane defined by a given x-y axis (or Cartesian Plane), there is no reason to presume that there is not another axis (z) along which that truth is also defined. For instance, it is true that Darwinian evolution has no intellectual footing in Western culture until the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. It is also true that Aristotle presents and rejects exactly the same mechanism of natural, biological evolution in his work entitled Nature, or Physics. (Book II, part 8). Coming to recognize the relationship between Aristotle, Darwin, and the Enlightenment does nothing to change the original truth regarding Darwin’s theory (by original truth, of course, the only thing that can consistently be intended is that it has a profound influence on the culture after 1859–it would be intellectually risky at best and more likely outright fraudulent to presume the theory’s accuracy as some kind of truth.)
For an example in a different domain: there is a point to saying every layperson can study the Bible and discover its truth while at the same time saying that the scholar’s most strenuous effort to plum the intricate details of a passage is valuable. Nothing gained by the latter will diminish or undo the former. The only reason things sometimes appear otherwise is that it is not uncommon for students of a passage to reach conclusions beyond their grasp within a particular plane. The information is there. And the curve is before them. But they describe features outside the plane to which they are exposed. (So in error is someone who reads the parable of the sower and the seed and speaks about why the soils were different in the first place!)
Back to the point: Anyone dealing with any truth anywhere has equal access to the truth at whatever level of intelligence they have obtained. More intelligence does not mean a different truth, it simply means a different level of complexity, or detail, or quantity; a different plane within and below which to describe that truth. But no shape above a particular section will change that section or the shape below it. Here, the model must be reinforced to prevent an error in the reader’s use of the analogy. (If a person’s understanding of a given plane (a section on an x-y axis) changes as they grasp something higher up the z-axis, it would be an indication that they had not grasped the curve of the original x-y axis at all, since in the analogy presented the curve is the truth, not just a set of data. Speculation about data beyond the plane in question is evidence that the curve (truth) on that level has not been grasped.
The point? Given that model (an arguable hypothesis, granted, but a defensible one to be sure) once the shape of any truth breaches a plane, the truth in that plane will always be just that–the truth. As a person’s intellect grows, they may be able to move up to grasp the higher dimensions of that truth. But the underlying truth remains exactly the same. So? So intelligence is never the problem or the solution to questions of truth (once, that is, the issue is grasped at all.) No amount of learning will undo the truths of childhood–not the “facts” of childhood, but the truths. The problem with arrogant Biblical scholars is the same as that of anti-theistic skeptics. It is the problem of presuming that because they are reasoning at a different point along the z-axis, the observations of their “inferiors” at lower points along that axis are wrong. But they are wrong in that presumption.
The issue of truth is not resolved with intelligence. It can be embellished. It can be appreciated. It can even be clarified. But truth itself is as plain to the simple child (observing in and below his plane) as to the mature genius (observing in and below his).
As a side note, and without due argumentation, the issue of truth, then, is volition–whether a given person is willing to see a given curve in given plane. It is the will which causes a person at a very low plane along the z-axis to speculate beyond the data to a curve or shape which is not present, and it is the will which causes a person at a higher plane along the z-axis to presume some error in the interpretation of the shape’s intersection with planes lower on the z-axis.
Long and short of it: there’s no justification for saying that a person believes or disbelieves because they are intelligent. If they can talk about the subject matter intelligently, they can believe either way. The question is simply which way they are willing to believe. Evidence (or its lack) is not the problem. Presuppositions are not the solution. A person who does not choose to believe something won’t, regardless of evidence and even presuppositions. And a person who chooses to believe can, similarly regardless. But the position is not equivocal. There is a curve in the plane. There is a truth. But people should stop pretending they can see it only because they are so intelligent. That pretense may be what they choose to believe, but it is not what’s there.