What is Truth?
"What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate.  Truth, it seems, is a very difficult thing to know, but if the actions of Pontius Pilate are any indication, the consequences of ignorance are far worse.  Luckily, we don't have to be ignorant anymore.  A firestorm of truth has been unleashed during the last dozen decades – yielding both light to enhance our understanding, and fire to burn the falsehoods of the past into oblivion.  
Truth shimmers before us like a double-edged sword.  Science is one blade of that sword.  History is the other.  Science is what we can observe.  History is the testimony of what others have observed.  Both are valid.  Both are necessary.  Both are truth.  Science is known by means of careful observation and experimentation.  History is known by means of archaeology, scholarship, and the practice of critically analyzing the legends and writings which have come down to us.
This double-edged sword, science and history, cuts across the four corners of this world.  Science cuts across the four corners of the modern world – from the tropical islands of the Galapagos to the wintery mountains of the Burgess Shale, from the impact crater in the Yucatan to the freshly discovered fossil beds of China.  History cuts across the four corners of the ancient world – from the clay tablets of Babylon to the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, from the Prophet on the steppes of Persia to the Gnostic in the sands of Egypt.  Science and history echo through eternity, and together they ever increase the treasures and perils of truth's infinite mysteries.
Science is observation.  Religion is belief.  Observation causes belief.  Seeing is believing.  We believe what we observe.  Insofar as belief is derived from observation, religion should therefore be derived from science.  Some say the two should be kept separate.  Yet this opinion is a product of politics, not of truth.  Religion should not be kept separate from science.  Rather, religion should be a product of science. 
History is testimony.  Religion is belief.  Insofar as courts of law establish their belief upon testimony, we should establish religion upon history. 
Conventional wisdom usually results from the collective examination of all available information.  As such, it normally should be respected.  But when new information comes to light, then the conventional wisdom must change in order to become congruent with the newly discovered truth.  If it does not change, then it no longer deserves to be the conventional wisdom.  Such is the state of today's theological nobility.  Because they reject science and history, their aging castles are built on the shifting sands of blind existential faith.  Faith in faith is faith on sand.  Faith in truth is faith on rock. 

Science and history are that rock of truth.