When Samuel and Mary were younger, one of our favorite shows was Mythbusters. The Discovery Channel produced the show, and it ran from 2003 to 2016. Reruns were on repeat. So, we watched it all the time.

The two hosts, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, were seasoned special effects guys who, over the years, had built solid scientific resumes. The show was about taking old myths and testing them scientifically. For example, the team investigated whether a person can actually gain a speed advantage or maintain their momentum by "running" their legs in the air before being dropped onto the ground, like you see in cartoons or action movies. Turns out, being lowered to the ground at different speeds with your legs already moving doesn’t raise the top speed.

Conclusion? Myth busted.

And in the other one, they wanted to test the urban legend that if you dropped a penny from the Empire State Building on somebody’s head, the speed of the penny would kill them. So, using ballistic gel in the shape and density of a human skull, they simulated dropping a penny from the Empire State Building onto it. They determined a penny didn’t have enough mass to do much more than feel like a bug bite.

Again? Myth busted.

I'm guessing you can imagine why the show appealed to children ... and their dad.

But what I found so fascinating about it was what it says about the world we inhabit. Living in a technological era, boosted by incredible advances in science that allow us to send people to the moon, we want to know what are the things we can trust.

Because, if we're honest, with the world-altering possibilities introduced by AI and deepfakes, it's not entirely possible to trust even your own eyes and ears anymore. Couple that with a government that currently seems bent on routinely passing off lies as truth—with the belief that people will believe just about anything if you say it loud enough and often enough—and it feels like we need to have our critical thinking caps constantly adjusted.

Which, let’s be honest, is exhausting. The thing is, it used to be that eyes and ears were enough, but not anymore.

Human beings, as a species, are inherently curious about our own world and the universe in which it resides. Sophisticated, modern people like us—we want to know stuff. And we want to know that the stuff we think we know is true. When the sands shift beneath our feet, we start looking for solid ground. Makes sense, right?

But, even though we have better tools to make those determinations about truth and facts than we did throughout most of history, we’re still not free from uncertainty. And we’re not the only historical travelers who've wanted to know what's true and what isn't, how we can know what we think we know, what's the best way to discover what we can trust, and what we can ignore as myths yet to be busted.

People have always had to make those determinations. “Fake news” is nothing new.

Even our most distant human relatives realized their survival depended on whether the watering hole was fit for drinking, whether the food they were eating would make them sick, and which caves were safe to sleep in and which held long-toothed predators. It mattered.

It's always mattered. Take our passage for this morning. As the scene opens, it's evening on Easter Sunday. Just that morning, Jesus had unleashed his amazing sound-and-light show.

After that fiasco, Jesus’ best friends are holed up in a locked room, afraid to go down to the Thornton’s for Twinkies and Doritos. They know that they’re considered "known accomplices,” because their rabbi had been staring back from wanted posters on the Post Office wall for so long.”

Meaning, of course, that the heat was on. They lived with the constant fear that they might soon join their leader in the sweet by and by. Only, they were pretty sure they hadn't been issued the same tickets for a return flight to the land of the living that Jesus had enjoyed on Easter that very morning.

So, it's not difficult to imagine them all huddled together in the same locked room, occasionally looking through a crack in the blinds for the tell-tale signs that Pilate's goons were pulling up outside in a SWAT van.

It also makes sense that when Jesus, who'd gone missing shortly after making his Easter appearance, shows up a week later, having passed through a locked door, they might want to check that the guy standing in their midst is the genuine article. So, Jesus bares his wounds for them, demonstrating to their satisfaction that he wasn't a deepfake generated by some guy with a Mountain Dew addiction in their basement.

But one of the disciples, Thomas, wasn't there. Not because he'd given up, and not because his faith was thinner than everybody else's, but just because … you know … for whatever reason, he wasn't there. And while the rest of them were processing their relief, Thomas was still sitting somewhere in the city with nothing but snapshots of Good Friday to hold onto.

Think about it. Thomas had watched his closest friend executed by the state. He'd witnessed Rome do what Rome does. And, apparently, he wasn’t privy yet to the whole resurrection thing.