Dallas Willard, Hearing God:

The test of character posed by the gentleness of God’s approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.

Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel — or one desperate for another life — therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

There is a grand Christian intellectual tradition of which our MTV generation is completely ignorant. I don’t know how people can think orbiting teapots or flying spaghetti monsters constitute a decent argument against the notion of a Creator.

[plagiarized from the excellent Quodlibeta blog, emphasis added]