Are we smarter than the ancients?

Over at TitusOneNine, some of the commenters are rehearsing their scorn for the so-called liberal notion that we today are supposedly smarter than the ancients.

We probably aren’t any more innately gifted than the ancients were. But it’s indisputable that the intellectual tools we have for observing and making sense of the universe are many orders of magnitude better than what the ancients had.  Those tools are the result of thousands of years of accumulated experience and insights, tested against the reality of the world that God wrought.

(We should certainly hope that our gifts of memory, reason, and skill would have improved our intellectual tools over all this time!)

At the controls of his personal jet plane, John Travolta can cover the 26+ miles of the marathon run in roughly 3 minutes.  It’s thought that Phidippides, the ancient Greek hero of Marathon, took about 3 hours. It’s not that Travolta is 60 times better as an athlete; he just has better transportation tools.