If the intrinsically personal origin of the universe is rejected, what alternative outlook can anyone have?  It must be said emphatically that there is no final answer except that man is a product of the impersonal, plus time, plus chance.  No one has ever succeeded in finding personality on this basis, though many, like the late Teilhard de Chardin, have tried.  It cannot be done.  The conclusion that we are the natural products of the impersonal, plus time and chance, is the only one, unless we begin with personality.  And no one has shown how time plus chance can produce a qualitative change from impersonal to personal.   

If this were true, we would be hopelessly caught.  But when the Bible says that man is created in the image of a personal God, it gives us a starting-point.  No humanistic system has provided justification for man to begin with himself.  The Bible’s answer is totally unique.  At one and the same time it provides the reason why a man may do what he must do (start with himself), and it tells him the adequate reference point, the infinite-personal God.  This is in complete contrast to other systems in which man begins with himself, neither knowing why he has a right to begin from himself, nor in what direction to begin inching along.   

The Bible’s story of ‘us…is trustworthy and logical.  The whole of our personality…our ‘being’…our awareness of self…our sense of objective right and wrong…our internal desire to connect with spiritual reality…the all and everything of who we are is evidence that we were created and designed to look upward to connect with our Creator and not to look downward for a connection to the animal or the machine.  We are made in the image of God to ‘know’ Him who is there.  The bible is the authoritative account of our origin, meaning, and purpose.   

Thoughts developed and/or taken from the works of Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer, Trilogy – Escape From Reason