"Why is religion so important to most Americans and so trivial to most intellectuals?"

Is it just a matter of IQ? (Though I thought intellectuals no longer believed in IQ...) But empirically it can't be an IQ issue, because so many of history's greatest minds based their lives on religion — from Michaelangelo or Bach to Spinoza or Dante or Kant. Do modern intellectuals actually believe that all such people are naively deluded? Or could they be missing something themselves?

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies and author of Drawiing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.