The four biggest questions that surveyed young people had were:
1. How can I know that God exists?
2. How could a good God send people to hell?
3. How can I believe in a good God when there is so much suffering?
4. Doesn’t evolution prove that God doesn’t exist?
The article's author went on to comment:
What strikes me about those questions is that they are very focused on the question of God’s existence and his nature
And is this surprising? I think not, because the Bible starts with these very questions: it sets out the parameters of the revelation of God in basic ontology linking immediately to the basic existential questions.
The author goes on to discuss this:
In our apologetics we often get caught up in the questions that we think are important, like: “did Jesus rise from the dead?” “Why doesn’t God want us to have sex before marriage?” “Can I take the bible literally?”These are good questions, but we should be dealing with the more foundational questions first such as: “Who is God?” even when we are teaching kids that we think are well informed.
In the survey, as well as choosing from a range of questions, there was the option of writing down your own question. Popular questions that came up repeatedly were:
1. Where does God come from?
2. Why did God make us?
3. If the Big Bang is true does that mean God is not?
4. What is heaven & hell and how do you go there?
The mistake that is made is Christian thinkers not engaging with the thought world of those outside the church; but assuming a shared thought world.
Yet, Paul, 2000 years ago, saw the issue, and confronted it in Athens. In Acts 17:22ff, he showed us how to evangelise outside of a Christian thought world:
So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;
A comment on the Youthworks website put it this way:
This article indicates a deeper theological problem; and that is we seem to think [and] convey to our children, and probably the world, that profound questions about our being here at all can be answered independently of God. This arises from the empty notion that Genesis 1 doesn't tell us 'how' or 'what' but only 'why'; when, of course, the three questions cannot be separated. If the how or what of our being can be answered without reference to 'why' then the 'why' is not truly informative; but is detached from the world.
The contrary is the case, however, in the Bible's 'view'. That is, at base the question that the Bible answers first off is 'who' and this is folded out in terms of 'what', 'how' and 'why'. All are bound up with one another and reality is finally personal, not finally material, which is insisted by the modern materialism that hides behind the facade (the house of cards, really) of evolutionary dogma and yet insists that it provides foundational truths about our world.
In a Christian frame, science is not philosophically separate from theology, but grows out of it. And this is reflected in the history of modern science growing out of a thought-world that took its cues from the Bible's structuring of the real world as created by God; and created recently and rapidly, which underlines the hand of God, and not material independence mediated by extended periods of time isolating the cosmos from its creator.
