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Verse:And God gave Solomon wisdom and exceedingly great understanding, and largeness of heart like the sand on the seashore. —1 Kings 4:29
With all the scientific research that has been done and with all the knowledge available today, neuroscientists still confess that it is virtually impossible to re-create human intelligence and grasp how the brain works.
Even so, several psychological tests have been developed to assess human intelligence. In the early twentieth century, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon proposed a “grade scale of intelligence” for testing the intelligence of children.
On April 19, 1912, at the V Congress for Experimental Psychology in Berlin, Germany, William L. Stern presented a paper, “The Psychological Methods of Intelligence Testing.” In his paper, he used the expression “IQ = Intelligence Quotient” and suggested a formula to calculate it. But even more modern tests have their limitations. Some critics say that IQ stands for “Incomplete and Questionable”! Moving beyond the notion of intelligence as mere rational thought, Howard E. Gardner identified seven different multiple intelligences in 1983.31 But in 1999, Gardner increased that number to the following eight: linguistic, logic-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Yet, in 2003, Gardner himself confessed, “And as I try to understand happenings in areas ranging from genetics to cyberspace, I wish I had a lot more intelligence!” Today, much is also made of artificial intelligence in machines. But this so-called intelligence comes from the human minds that conceive and develop the machines.
If we could map the neurologic synapses of our own brain at any given moment, by the time we grasped them, our brains would have already developed new configurations. And this is an endless process. Many modern psychologists believe that complex human intelligence is merely derived from natural evolutionary processes.
But as Christians, we know that all of them come from God, the Source of “every good and perfect gift” (James 1:17, NIV), and should be used for His honor and glory (Jeremiah 9:23, 24). Are you using your intelligence and talent for God’s honor and glory?