Post Author: Bill Pratt
If there is no benevolent and omnipotent God, then man seems to be the only viable solution to solving man’s problems. We have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps because there is nobody to help us.
Nowadays it seems laughable to think, after all we’ve been through in the last hundred years as a race, that we will create a paradise on earth by ourselves. In the early 20th century, however, there were those who thought that mankind was on the brink of something wonderful, that we could solve all our problems.
Take the famous author, H. G. Wells. Here is an excerpt from his book, A Short History of the World, written in 1937.
Can we doubt that presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace, and that our children will live in a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from strength to strength in an ever-widening circle of achievement? What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state…form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.
As Christians, this viewpoint is ruled out by Scripture. Man cannot pull himself out of the quicksand he is in – we need a divine hand to reach down and pull us out. The sin nature that resides in each person renders Wells’ assessment of the abilities of man hopelessly naive. Man has boundless capacity for evil when given the power to do so, and there is nothing we as a race can do to completely eradicate this propensity.
After Wells witnessed the atrocities of WWII, he came to understand how far he had misjudged mankind:
The cold-blooded massacres of the defenseless, the return of deliberate and organized torture, mental torment, and fear to a world from which such things had seemed well nigh banished—has come near to breaking my spirit altogether…“Homo Sapiens,” as he has been pleased to call himself, is played out. — A Mind at the End of Its Tether (1946)
If you are a Christian, you not only know that we need a divine hand, you know that we are getting it. Victory over sin is certain. Rather than placing our hope in the violent heart of man, we place our hope in the Prince of Peace.
Vampire novelist Anne Rice announced in 1998 that she was converting to Christianity after having turned her back on it for thirty years as an atheist. She then announced in 2010 that she was leaving organized religion, but still believed wholeheartedly in Jesus Christ. In essence, Rice struggled with some of the public policies that conservative Christians were advocating, but she claims that she absolutely retained her faith.