TOM GILSON — “I was raised believing in Christ, but my professors were starting to convince me it was mindless and stupid to believe in Christ.”

I was at dinner last night with friends, one of whom brought his wife along. I’d never met her, so I was fascinated to hear her story of how she had come to re-confirm her faith in Jesus Christ. As her comment quoted above makes clear, she had been faltering in her faith as a college student. Fortunately, she met someone who knew there were reasons to believe. That man is now her husband.

Christianity has an enormous heritage of intellectual strength, something widely known and acknowledged until fairly recently. Forgetfulness about that heritage has given fuel to a movement called New Atheism, which takes pride in atheism’s supposed monopoly on science, reason and logic.

The prominent New Atheist leader Richard Dawkins has famously said that Christians’ beliefs should be ridiculed. I was there when he said it, at the “Reason Rally,” an atheist gathering on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in March 2012. The entire message of the day was that only atheists are real thinkers.

It’s the sort of attack that I think has left some believers back-pedaling, wondering whether they can really believe what they say they believe. There’s no need for such worries, though. The overwhelming majority of the earliest scientists, even up through the early 20th century were believers. Many of them were priests and monks. The same goes for artists, musicians, writers, poets and playwrights.

And nowadays there are still many Christian lights in the arts and in the academic world, some well-established and some still in training. Sitting with us at the table the other night were two current Oxford University Ph.D. students, both of them Christians.

That’s not to say that Christianity is credible just because some bright people believe in it. Our faith stands because the facts of history, nature and sound reasoning support it. That day in 2012 I was at the Reason Rally to help explain (yes) reasons that Christianity is intellectually viable, through a book I had helped produce called True Reason.

My new friends’ professors were misinformed about the history of science and faith, indeed, about all of intellectual history and faith. It’s not entirely their fault. Misinformation of this sort runs rampant through our culture. How many of us learned in school that Christians in the Middle Ages believed the world was flat? They didn’t. The top astronomy book of the day was titled “Sphere.”

The myth of medieval flat-earthers can probably be traced to the year 1828, and to none other than the highly imaginative Washington Irving. The flat-earthers in his History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus were no more real than his Headless Horseman from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

This is just one example of many things some people confidently yet falsely believe about Christianity’s supposed mindlessness. So the next time someone suggests to you that Christianity is only for the unthinking, you might politely ask them where they got that information. Even professors can be wrong. Our faith stands on solid ground.