Discovering purpose has become one of the defining challenges facing young adults.
A recent Harvard study found that 58% of young adults experienced little or no meaning or purpose in their lives during the previous month, while half said uncertainty about their future had negatively affected their mental health. Those who lacked a sense of purpose were more than twice as likely to report anxiety and depression.
At the same time, another trend is emerging. Barna’s latest research shows commitment to Jesus is rising among younger generations, reversing years of decline and challenging long-held assumptions about religion’s future in America. Among Gen Z men, commitment to Jesus has increased 15 percentage points since 2019.
Taken together, the trends point to a generation asking bigger questions than many expected: Why are we here? Does life have meaning? Is there a purpose behind existence?
For author and apologist Lee Strobel, the renewed interest in those questions isn’t surprising.
“We see curiosity driven by Generation Z,” Strobel told RELEVANT. “Young people who are asking the questions about the meaning of life, about the purpose of life. Is this all there is? Is there more? A lot of that’s coming from younger people who are asking legitimate questions about why we’re here.”
What’s surprising, at least according to Strobel, is where those questions are leading.
For much of the last century, the assumption was that scientific progress would eventually eliminate the need for spiritual explanations. As humanity learned more about the universe, faith would become increasingly unnecessary.
Instead, Strobel argues that some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the last several decades have done the opposite.
“The scientific evidence not only played a role,” he said, reflecting on his own journey from atheism to Christianity, “but in the last several decades has become stronger, more clear, more compelling, more powerful, more persuasive than it ever has been in the history of the world.”
Strobel’s interest in the relationship between science and faith stretches back years. He explored many of those themes in The Case for a Creator and more recently in Is God Real?, but he says one area continues to stand out above the rest: the origin of the universe.
“When I was an atheist, skeptics like me believed the universe was eternal,” he said. “It always existed.”
Today, that view has largely disappeared from mainstream science. Thanks to decades of research in cosmology, scientists overwhelmingly agree that the universe had a beginning.
For Strobel, that discovery creates a question that science alone cannot answer.
“Whatever begins to exist has a cause behind it,” he said. “We now know that the universe did begin to exist. Therefore, the universe must have a cause behind it.”
From there, he argues, the conversation naturally shifts from physics to philosophy.
“What kind of a cause could bring a universe into existence?” Strobel asked. “It must be transcendent—that is, separate from creation. It must be spirit because it existed before the physical world. It must be eternal because it existed before physical time came into being. It must be powerful given the potency of the creation event.”
For Strobel, the significance of modern cosmology isn’t that it proves Christianity. It’s that it has reopened questions many people assumed had already been settled.
“The origin of the universe points very powerfully toward the existence of a creator who matches the description of the God of the Bible,” he said.
The same is true, he argues, in biology.
Scientists have long understood DNA as the blueprint of life, but advances in genetics have revealed a level of complexity that continues to astonish researchers.
“We now recognize DNA for what it is,” Strobel said. “A four-letter chemical alphabet that spells out the precise assembly instructions for all of the proteins out of which we’re made.”
Much of this research has emerged during the last half-century, which he believes helps explain why many Christians still assume science and faith are at odds.
“This is recent stuff,” he said. “The church lags behind a little bit, but that’s okay. It’s catching up. I think we ought to embrace the direction that science is pointing.”
Perhaps the most intriguing area of research, however, involves human consciousness.
For decades, many scientists assumed consciousness would eventually be explained entirely through physical processes in the brain. Today, the question remains far from settled.
“That’s a huge issue,” Strobel said. “People were saying that there’s no difference between our brain and our consciousness. And now we’re beginning to understand, wait a minute, there is a difference.”
He points to growing interest in consciousness research, as well as studies examining near-death experiences, as evidence that some of science’s biggest mysteries remain unresolved.
Whether those investigations ultimately support his conclusions or not, Strobel believes they reveal something important about the moment we’re living in: the deeper we investigate reality, the more profound the questions become.
That’s one reason he sees the current spiritual curiosity among younger generations as more than a passing trend.
Rather than viewing science and faith as competing explanations, many young adults appear increasingly willing to explore both.
“I kind of tip my hat to young people who are willing to explore and investigate those kinds of issues,” Strobel said.
For all the predictions that science would eventually make questions about God irrelevant, the opposite may be happening. Scientific discovery continues to expand humanity’s understanding of the universe, but it has also exposed mysteries that remain difficult to explain.
As Strobel sees it, that’s part of what makes this moment so fascinating.
“The sense of wonder and awe that came with that mission,” he said, referring to recent images captured during a lunar mission, “is the same sense of wonder and awe that we get when we consider the origin of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe.”
The search for meaning has hardly disappeared in the scientific age.
If anything, it may be gaining new momentum.
