It is no accident the century after the Enlightenment saw more deaths by genocide than all of history to that date. Humankind separated from God is humankind separated from its moral compass.

Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith.---I Timothy 6:20-21

      Amy was in tears, with no real idea where to turn for help. She'd just been dismantled by a "Christian" professor who laughed at her when she answered his questions about how the world was made. Worse, he'd also called her naïve for believing the Bible was true and without mistakes. Other students joined the debate, and it seemed like most of them were also laughing at her. For the first time in her young life, Amy wondered what was truth; and how she could know. Her tears were real and so were her doubts.

      From the birth of Christ to the so-called Age of Reason, it was the Christian church which was known as the "NPR crowd" of culture. We were the leaders in exploring answers to the hard questions of life.

      On the one hand, National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System, Discovery & History Channels are attractive to Christians because they examine and discuss topics the church is often silent about. On the other hand, these bastions of cultural exploration are often offensive to Christians because they dismiss the supernatural nature of God, as well as denying His spiritual authority.

      While the opponents of faith argue that religion is the cause of most wars and most violence, history doesn't support that accusation. Only when humans took for themselves the authority God held as His own did the intensity of human violence increase. It is no accident the century after the Enlightenment saw more deaths by genocide than all of history to that date.

      Humankind separated from God is humankind separated from its moral compass.

     This is precisely why Amy was struggling. It is not enough to tell our children to "accept on faith" what Scripture teaches. That kind of thinking leaves them adrift when anti-faith biases at academic institutions---or in the culture at large---plant seeds of doubt about ultimate truth. We must teach them that the gap between what research shows and what God says is due to missing pieces of the puzzle we've not yet uncovered; and usually because the tools to uncover the missing pieces haven't yet been invented.

     Jesus expects us to be thinkers; He expects us to explore. He expects us to ask and answer the hard questions of life. He has but one caveat: We must test every answer against what Scripture teaches.

     When modern scientific thinking conflicts with the Bible, Christians should step up their involvement in scientific research. We should be active in exploration, debate and reasoned discussions!

     Science is, at most, a collection of the best information we have on a subject at the present time, given the limits of our research tools. The "facts" of science are always changing; meaning no "fact" is ever rooted in the certainty our finite minds like to attach to it. That's why Isaac Newton broke new ground after hundreds of years; and why Albert Einstein fixed the few things Newton got wrong. (For a marvelous example of this truth, one need only examine science's dramatically changing "facts" around "dark matter" over the past twenty years.)

     Science is a transient part of the human experience, and Christians must be active participants in the search for truth.

     For many of our coworkers and friends, and for many of our children, the path to a saving faith in Jesus Christ goes through---not around---the hard questions of life. It's time for Christians to blaze those trails again, fired up by a bold confidence that knowledge is truth and truth is God's domain.