Benjamin Carson Interview (page: 6 / 9) Pediatric Neurosurgeon	Print Interview

You obviously had a considerable religious background. I know faith is very important to you. At what point did it become important in your life? How much of your success do you attribute to it?

Benjamin Carson: That actually was the day that it became very important to me, that day in the bathroom. Because when I came out and that temper was gone, I knew there was something more that was involved than just me determining that I wasn't going to get angry anymore. It became clear to me at that point that God was a real entity you could call upon. I've had multiple experiences in my life, subsequently, that made it very clear to me that there was really a supernatural being called God that you could call upon to take care of problems. It gives me an extra sense of confidence.

I have come into conflict sometimes with people in the scientific community who say, "How can you believe in a God? Somebody who was brought up in the sciences, you understand evolution and all of these various theories, and natural selection, how can you believe in God?" And I say, au contraire. Because when I look at my belief in God, and I look at the order of the universe, when I look at how the earth goes around the sun, and then I look at all the other things that are orbiting, I know that that doesn't just happen. When I look at the human brain with hundreds of billions of interconnections, much more sophisticated than anything that we can create and call a computer, I know that that didn't just happen.

Copernicus made a model of the universe that he would turn with a crank, and all the planets would rotate around the sun. He showed it to the king and the king said, "This is really an intricate thing, this is wonderful. How did this happen?" And he said, "It just came into being. It just popped up." And he said, "No, no. Somebody had to make this." He had proved his point, that yes, there was a creator.

It has become an essential part of my life and my being. It's part of my B.I.G. philosophy, the last letter. The G is for God. I feel very strongly that, in American society, we should not be ashamed of it. We shouldn't shy away from it. Consider the fact that it's on our money. Every coin and every bill says, "In God We Trust." It's in our pledge; it's in the preamble to our Constitution. It talks about our creator. It's on our courtrooms. On the walls it says, "In God We Trust." When we created this nation, we believed in God, why do we all of a sudden have to say we don't believe in Him? I believe that's one of the reasons we got to be so great, so quickly.

What do you say to kids who look at you and say, "He is inherently smarter than I am. He can get it together better than I can, and there's something just basically unfair about the universe."

Benjamin Carson: I would say to them, "That's exactly the way I felt when I wasn't doing well." I would look at some of the kids in my class -- Bobby, Steve, Lenora -- who always got "A"s and I would just say, "They're inherently smarter than I am. I just don't understand things the way they do." And I would leave it at that.

The fact of the matter is, once I developed confidence in myself and began to believe that I was smart, then all of those innate abilities began to come out. Everybody has them, everybody who has a normal brain, because there is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. There's almost nothing that you can't do.

It's really just a matter of understanding that. Take two baseball players, two rookies that come up. The first day in the Major Leagues and the first one comes up, he looks out at the mound, and he sees Nolan Ryan. "Oh no! He's a legend in his own time, he's got a 95 mile-an-hour fast ball, struck out more men than anybody in the history of baseball, more no-hitters. I probably won't even see the ball." With that mind-set, he's very unlikely to get a hit. Another rookie comes up, with the same talent. He looks out there and says, "Nolan Ryan, he's an old man. I'm probably going to knock the cover off this ball." He's going to approach that assignment in a completely different way, and his chance of getting a hit is much greater.

It's really a matter of the mind-set and what one thinks. Achievement really has very little to do with some innate intellectual gift.

You are as knowledgeable about the brain and the way it functions as almost anybody, and you're arguing against a presupposition that seems obvious to many people, that some of us are just born better. Could you clarify that?

Benjamin Carson: Let me make it very dramatic. There was this book that came out a couple of years ago called, The Bell Curve. I'm sure you remember that. It said black people were, perhaps, not intellectually able to do certain things very well, but that they were particularly good at some other things -- basketball, maybe.

What an absurd thing that is! If, starting today, all the young black girls in America said, "We're not going out with you guys unless you can work a calculus problem," the next edition of The Bell Curve would come out saying, "Black people have this innate ability to perform calculus problems. They can't play basketball very well, but they're really good at calculus." It's a matter of what a person concentrates on. It's a matter of what a person feels is important.

To try to make artificial distinctions on non-science, which is what these silly guys did, is just divisive and stupid. What we need to do is concentrate on those things that are uplifting and positive in our society. I could tell you story after story after story of individuals in our society who have overcome enormous odds, who were not expected to do things, who have done so.

These are the people that we need to concentrate on. These are the people we need to talk about. We don't need to be talking about Madonna, and Michael Jordan, and Michael Jackson. I don't have anything against these people, I really don't. But, the fact of the matter is that's not uplifting anybody. That's not creating the kind of society we want to create. I think all of us have some significant responsibility in that.

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