David asked, “What is man that you are mindful of him,…” Psa 8:4
Throughout the ages this question has burned in the heart of man. How we answer it determines our view for living and the purpose for our existence. To answer it wrongly leads to the absence of creation and ultimately the denial of the creator.
A RABBI WAS explaining to his pupils how strongly God condemns the worship of idols. One of them asked, "If God so abhors idolatry, why does He not destroy the idols that men worship?" The Rabbi replied, "Because some of them, the sun and the moon for example, are an essential part of the fabric of God's economy." After a moment's pause, the student said, "Then why does He not at least destroy those that are not essential?" To which the Rabbi answered, "Because it would then appear He was condoning the worship of the idols He did not destroy."
The literature of antiquity is full of little exchanges like this; neat, satisfying in a way, wise too, and not without genuine force. Such answers were common when men believed that the universe was created by God with man particularly in mind. It was assumed that God had created the heavens and that therefore He could "tamper" with it if necessary for man's benefit: for, after all, man was of greater importance than the sun and the moon. It seemed self-evident to man, after the Incarnation, that the Earth was paramount among the heavenly bodies and that man was paramount on the earth. The heavens and the earth were created for man's sake.
But during the past hundred years the universe has been studied without reference to God as its Creator and without any thought that man might be its raison d'etre. It seems that as its immensity has become increasingly apparent so has man's insignificance in terms of size, until he has dwindled in importance virtually to the vanishing point.
Man’s significance has thus come to be defined either in terms of size and man is very small relative to the vastness of the universe or in terms of duration of a man's life. By these standards man judges his own worth to be virtually nil.
But this very judgment is self-contradictory, for if man is of no consequence, then neither is his judgment of what is of consequence. His very opinion about the Cosmos can carry little weight in a Cosmos which scarcely recognizes his existence and would be no different if he ceased to exist altogether. These presumptuous statements about the insignificance of man can logically be ignored for, by their own admission, if man is of no consequence so, then, are his opinions of no significance even if his knowledge of the "facts" is tremendous.
This philosophy of science, which is a philosophy of materialism, is proving to be quite inadequate because it is quite unable to deal effectively with purposes, and man must have purpose to live by. This is particularly true of young people whose power of dedication is strong and who feel the futility of modern life. History has shown and points out how well dictators have learned this truth and how easily they can rally people who, having no other commitments and feeling the emptiness of life, are eager to dedicate themselves to some cause.
If we cannot understand how readily people may surrender their liberty, it is because we have forgotten how stimulating dedication can be. I’m sorry to report that much of the blame for this impoverishment is the philosophy that inevitably creates a sense of purposelessness by reducing man's importance in the universe almost to zero. To many thinking people it is becoming apparent once again that there is much truth in the view of man as "the measure of all things," and that the universe has meaning only when man is made the key. The size of man’s body and the length of his earthly life cannot be used as guides to his importance. Man as a creation of God is still the measure of the true significance of all else in the universe. But such a "purpose" must be with specific reference to man, or it has no power to affect his behavior.
Since it is now held almost without exception by modern philosopher-scientists that man has quite by accident been thrown up in some blind and purposeless cosmic process, the unhappy consequences of such a view are at last being recognized and an effort is being made to engender some kind of substitute purpose.
Science is now speaking of a process that through eons of time and without direction finally produced a creature, man, who by reason of his possession of self-consciousness and his ability to make delayed decisions is freed from the previous all-pervasive determinism of the natural order and can therefore undertake that which no creature before him had been able to undertake, namely, the directing of his own future. The belief that man is the product of causes which had no pre-vision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.
The kind of goal such men declare is entirely unlike the goal which moved Augustine to write his City of God or Aquinas his Summa Theologica or Dante his Divine Comedy. Theirs was essentially a goal for man in God, as Bunyan's was a goal for man in Christ, and as such both had the power to inspire.
Far better would it have been to hold to the spiritual view of man as an act of faith and allow that humanly derived knowledge might illuminate or elaborate the details of that faith, but never supply its foundations. Why should we fear to admit that our understanding stems in part from what we believe?
Science itself progresses by the formulation of hypotheses which are nothing less than acts of faith. The essential difference is that science demands that a hypothesis must be subject to experimental validation by the experimenter. The kind of faith with which a Christian undergirds his philosophy is similarly experimentally verifiable, but not in the laboratory sense, for the rules are not the same. But this does not mean it is any less real or valid. The basic assumption which he makes is that God exists as a personal but purely spiritual Being, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. The existence of God can be demonstrated by any individual who is willing to accept the conditions which God Himself has imposed upon such an experiment: but he can only make this demonstration with absolute certainty for himself. In other words, there is a kind of knowledge here that each man must gain personally and cannot acquire vicariously. Hence demonstration is not of the same kind that exists in a laboratory situation. But it is real knowledge, and such knowledge is the key that gives meaning to history, both the history of the individual and of the universe.
Let us then once more boldly declare our faith that man is indeed the measure of all things, not man by himself but man in God. And let us see what evidence there might be for such a tremendous claim that in the final analysis the very universe itself was made for man.
