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On Who & Why We are
"Is Jesus the Only Way?" in Jesus Under Fire, eds. Michael J. Wilkins and JP Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 190.
Consider this small sample of perennial human concerns. We are moral creatures with moral duties to one another, but we seem confused about the source of morality's claim upon our lives, unsure of our judgements about what is right and wrong, and curiously impotent to consistently practice our morality. Though we are familiar with the brevity of life, and some of us even make a tolerably good show of accepting the finitude of our existence, we have an irresistible and uncanny hankering for permanence. We have no trouble relating to the ambivalence of Woody Allen's confession, "It's not that I'm afraid to die; I just don't want to be there when it happens." We ponder inconclusively the personal and cosmic significance of the many evils of human experience. And we are shocked to find the worst of human impulses lurking in that most unwelcome of places — the deep recesses of our own hearts. Even if we are fortunate enough to be spared life's greater tragedies (war, famine, plague, and the like), we fret about the monotony that accompanies a life of relative ease and comfort — and we come full circle to wonder again what life is about.
The God Who Is There, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p131.
The historic Christian position is that man's dilemma has a moral
cause. God, being nondetermined, created man as a nondetermined person.
This is a difficult idea for anyone thinking in twentieth-century terms
because most twentieth-century thinking sees man as determined. He is
determined either by chemical factors, as the Marquis de Sade held and
Francis Crick is trying to prove, or by psychological factors, as Freud
and others have suggested, or by sociological factors, such as B.F.
Skinner holds. In these cases, or as a result of a fusion of them, man
is considered to be programmed. If this is the case, then man is not
the tremendous thing the Bible says he is, made in the image of God as
a personality who can make a free first choice. Because God created a
true universe outside of himself (or as an extension of his essence),
there is a true history which exists, man as created in God's image is
therefore a significant man in a significant history, who can choose to
obey the commandments of God and love him, or revolt against him.
"A Free Man's Worship", in Why I Am Not A Christian, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957) 107.
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end
they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears,
his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of
thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave;
that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration,
all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction
in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of
Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a
universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute,
are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can
hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the
firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation
henceforth be safely built.
"A Free Man's Worship", inWhy I Am Not A Christian, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957) 109.
In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the
God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven
which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire,
we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in
thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free
from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even,
while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that
energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of
the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with
that vision always before us.
A Free Man's Worship, inWhy I Am Not A Christian, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957) 115-16.
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow,
sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of
destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man,
condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through
the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow
falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the
coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his
own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a
mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly
defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but
unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite
the trampling march of unconscious power.
The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 345.
Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.

