“Smart people, because they are more intelligent and better educated, are able to give intellectual reasons justifying . . . beliefs that they arrived at for nonintelligent reasons.”19 Because it takes a great deal of intelligence to defend a religious faith I would describe as a delusion, smart people, because they are smart and educated in their faith, can actually be more deluded than others, not less. Hence, it is more difficult to convince them to see what they are defending as the delusion it is.
