When on a flight home through Ohio two days ago, I found myself seated next to a young girl - chinese, but with a southern twang, and precocious in all the ways we used to be, before puberty turns our gifts to angst. I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up.

"A marine biologist," she said.

Not five minutes later, she was telling me about how the world was created just 9,000 years ago, that before the flood there was no rain, water came from geysers shooting out of the ground, and that Noah took dinosaurs on his ark and they lived together with mankind for some time. She was homeschooled, she said, because her parents didn't trust the educational system.

What is this allure that the pious find in ignorance? How is it that after struggling for thousands of years to master our understanding of the world, so many of us turn from it in seeming horror, plugging our ears and humming to drown it out?

I believe that we, in the academic community, have overlooked how fundamentally threatening science is to some people. Evolution, on its face, seems to utterly deny the specialness of mankind, made in God's image and chosen to receive His word.

Their churches give them the choice of Meaning, and all that the academic world has to offer in its place is bleak, miserable truth. Small wonder they have flinched from it. But why is there no one to minister to these people, to help them find spiritual satisfaction without leashing their minds to absurdities?

Human beings require both knowledge and faith. Science and Religion have allowed themselves to become binary opposites, each offering one without admitting need for the other. In the end, we will all suffer for it.