Hiriedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900] is an adequate parable1of our times. Born in the same year Darwin wrote hisfirst sketch of On the Origin of Species, the youngNietzsche desired to be a minister, please God, andbenefit humanity. After reading Darwin, his religious'illusions' vanished, and he found himself confrontingnothingness. "ls there still an up and down? Are we notwandering aimlessly through an infinite void? Does notan empty space breathe upon us? Has it not growncolder?"]

Nietzsche found freedom for a while in his view ofsuperman. After all, he declared, it is evident that "manshall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation ofthe warrior: all else is folly."2

But Nietzsche's own feeble constitution was not fitfor war.. The sight of blood made him wish to vomit.The hard line he espoused did not suit him. His brilliantmind wavered and broke. After being cared for as anervous wreck, for many years, by a spinster sister, hefinished his days in an asylum.

The parallel with our era is obvious. The world ofNietzsche's infancy took God and meaning for granted,and even undertook the battle against 'evil' and 'selfish-ness.' But our modern generation has become a maniaage, where 'anything goes.'

All Theologies are Anthropologies

It is plain that all other conclusions depend upon thedoctrine of man, that is, upon humanity's estimate of itsown nature. All ideologies are actually anthropologies.All plans for the betterment of the human race are basedupon a specific view of the nature of man. Wrote A.F.Cockin:

We are living at the moment, and shall belikely to do so for some years, in a welter ofplans and proposals for the reordering of humansociety. Bretton Woods, UNO, the Nationaliza-tion of Industry, Social Security, and the like.When you come to look at all these schemes,you see quite clearly that they all have one char-acteristic in common. They are all in one formor another medical experiments. They are at-tempts to prescribe for the sickness of modernsociety. At a deeper level still they are seen to

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TIlE QIDDLE;TIlE GUE~E~;ThE AN~WEQ

by Desmond Ford

be attempts to prescribe for the sickness of hu-man nature.

Now the essential condition of effective pre-scription is sound diagnosis of the disease,knowing what is the matter. And the essentialcondition of accurate diagnosis is a thoroughworking knowledge, not only of the constitutionof this or that particular patient, but of the hu-man organism as such. The basis of medicineand surgery is the knowledge of physiology andanatomy.3The real question which needs to be put to the au-

thors of these many ingenious schemes for human bet-terment is a blunt one. In the plainest sense of thewords, do they really know what they are talking about?

Modem Commentators Pessimistic about Humanity

Albert Camus [1913-60] rightly analyzed the presentproblem of humanity. "Up till now man derived his co-herence from his Creator. But from the moment that heconsecrates his rupture with him, he finds himself deliv-ered over to the fleeting moment and to wasted sensibil-ity."4 The French playwright, Eugene Ionesco [1912- ]echoed the same when he asserted that "cut off from hisreligious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man islost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.liS

Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] saw this clearly and infamous lines affirmed:

That man is the product of causes which hadno prevision of the end they were achieving;that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears,his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of acci-dental collocations of atoms; that no fire, noheroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, canpreserve an individual beyond the grave; that allthe labour of the ages, all the devotion, all theinspiration, all the noonday brightness of hu-man genius, are destined to extinction in thevast death of the solar system, and that thewhole temple of man's achievement must inevi-tably be buried beneath the debris of a universein ruins-all these things, if not quite beyonddispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no phi-losophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, onlyon the firm foundation of unyielding despair,can the soul's habitation henceforth be safelybuilt.6Such a declaration strengthens the pronouncement

of Marx and Engels that "law, morality, religion are ...so many bourgeois interests." If so, humans are indeedcreatures economically determined, which is but to saythat when hungry enough, they fight.

Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]shifted the zone of con-trol. He suggested that humanity was controlled by itssex glands rather than its stomach. Whichever view isnearest to reality, the result remains the same-man isbut an animal, an amoral animal. In consequence, astheologian Paul Tillich has told us, "God died in thenineteenth century, and man in the twentieth."Berdyaev concluded, "Where there is no God, there is noman."

A Parable for Our Times

The dream described by Fyodor Dostoyevski [1821-81] in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment seems to be aparable concerning this age as foreseen by the author.Aware of the significance of the new matter and methodin current communication, Dostoyevski pictures thewhole world under process of disintegration because ofa terrible and strange plague. New kinds of microbespossessing intelligence and will attacked peoples' bod-ies. Those infected became mad and furious. But,

... never had men considered themselves sointellectual and so completely in possession ofthe truth as these sufferers, never had they con-sidered their decisions, their scientific conclu-sions, their moral convictions so infallible.Entire cities and nations went insane because of the

infection. In their fury people could no longer under-stand one another.

Each thought that he alone had the truthand was wretched looking at the others .... Theydid not know how to judge and could not agreewhat to consider evil and what good.In ceaseless rage they killed one another with their

armies. All day long, alarms rang in the towns and cit-ies, but when men rushed together they were unable tofind why or by whom they had been summoned. Tradeswere abandoned, and the land permitted to lie fallow.

Men met in groups, agreed on something,swore to keep together, but at once began onsomething quite different from what they hadproposed. They accused one another, foughtand killed each other.Conflagrations and famine spread over the world

until "all men and all things were involved in destruc-tion."

Dostoyevski concludes by saying:Only a few men could be saved in the whole

world. They were a pure chosen people, des-tined to found a new race and a new life, to re-new and purify the earth, but no one had seen

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these men, no one had heard their words andtheir voices.This remarkable narrative portrays many aspects of

the tragedy of our century and suggests what may yet lieahead. It is significant that Dostoyevski points out that adistinguishing characteristic of the crisis was that people"did not know how to judge and could not agree whatto consider evil and what good." That is, they did notpossess any ethical values on which they agreed. Thischaracteristic, according to many diagnosticians of ourtimes, particularly marks the present human dilemma.

Two Ways of Life

Sociologists, such as P.A. Sorokin, are alive to thesituation. This former University of Chicago professorwrote:

This means that the main issue of our timesis not democracy versus totalitarianism, nor lib-erty versus despotism; neither is it capitalismversus communism, nor pacifism versus milita-rism, nor internationalism versus nationalism,nor any of the current popular issues daily pro-claimed by statesmen and politicians, professorsand ministers, journalists and soapbox orators.All these popular issues are but small side is-sues-mere by-products of the main issue,namely, the sensate form of culture and way oflife versus another, different form?It is the purpose of our special edition of this maga-

zine, "Why Believe?" to set forth "another, differentform" of life to that our age takes for granted. We wishto assert that, for the world, it must be a choice betweenChrist and chaos.

The Cosmos and Humanity

On what grounds dare we assert that life has mean-ing, and that the meaning is Christ?

The immediate choice confronting all is to interpretthe cosmos by humanity-its highest product-or viceversa, interpret humanity by the cosmos. If we do thelatter, our lives become as meaningless as bubbles offroth. If we choose the former, we find ourselves with aviable, challenging interpretation of existence whichmakes every decision significant. The choice is ours, butthe results are not. Said E. Stanley Jones: "Is life abubble or is it an egg? Is it a bubble with nothing in it,or is it an egg filled with infinite possibilities? .. I votefor the egg view of life.... I must make my choice."B

eN. Cochrane asserts:The choice for man ... does not so much lie

between science and superstition as betweentwo kinds of faith, the one salutary, the otherdestructive, the one making for fulfilment, theother for frustration .... The former saves by il-lumining experience and giving it value interms of an absolute standard of truth ... ; thelatter ... to be followed by confusion, defeat and

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