What is Man?

I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.    Oliver Wendell Holmes.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou dost take thought of him? And the son of man, that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him a little lower than God, and dost crown him with glory and majesty! Thou dost make him to rule over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.

They (materialists) have reduced Man to even less than his natural finiteness by seeing him only as a complex arrangement of molecules, made complex by blind chance. Instead of seeing him as something great who is significant even in his sinning, they see Man in his essence only as an intrinsically competitive animal, that has no other basic operating principle than natural section brought about by the stronger, the fittest, ending on top. And they see Man as acting in this way both individually and collectively as a society. (Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto p 26)



Y.M. You have arrived at man, now?

O.M. Yes. Man the machine--man the impersonal engine. Whatsoever a man is, is due to his MAKE, and to the INFLUENCES brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, COMMANDED, by EXTERIOR influences--SOLELY. He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.

Y.M. Oh, come! Where did I get my opinion that this which you are talking is all foolishness?

O.M. It is a quite natural opinion--indeed an inevitable opinion--but YOU did not create the materials out of which it is formed. They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors. PERSONALLY you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the slender merit of PUTTING THE BORROWED MATERIALS TOGETHER. That was done AUTOMATICALLY--by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery's construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have NOT EVEN ANY COMMAND OVER IT.

Y.M. This is too much. You think I could have formed no opinion but that one?

O.M. Spontaneously? No. And YOU DID NOT FORM THAT ONE; your machinery did it for you--automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it.







…..A man's brain is so constructed that IT CAN ORIGINATE NOTHING WHATSOEVER. It can only use material obtained OUTSIDE. It is merely a machine; and it works automatically, not by will-power. IT HAS NO COMMAND OVER ITSELF, ITS OWNER HAS NO COMMAND OVER IT.

Y.M. Well, never mind Adam: but certainly Shakespeare's creations--

O.M. No, you mean Shakespeare's IMITATIONS. Shakespeare created nothing. He correctly observed, and he marvelously painted. He exactly portrayed people whom GOD had created; but he created none himself. Let us spare him the slander of charging him with trying. Shakespeare could not create. HE WAS A MACHINE, AND MACHINES DO NOT CREATE.



What does it mean to be made in the image of God.



Man as creator.



An essential part of true philosophy is a correct understanding of the pattern and plan of creation as revealed by the God who made it. For instance, we must see that each step “higher” – the machine, the plant, the animal, and man—has the use of that which is lower than itself. We find that man calls upon and utilizes the animal, the plant and the machine; the animal eats the plant. The plant utilizes the machine portion of the universe. Each thing, in God’s creation, utilizes the thing that God has made under it. We must also appreciate that each thing is limited by what it is. That is, a plant is limited by being a plant, but is also limited by the properties of those things under it that it uses. So plants can only use the chemicals on the basis of the boundary conditions of the chemicals’ properties. There is nothing else it can do.

But this is true also for man. We cannot make our own universe; we can only use what is under us in the order of creation. But there is a difference, and that is that the animal, for example, must use the lower as what it is. Man has to accept some necessary limitation of what is under him, be he can consciously act upon what it there. That is a real difference. The animal simply eats the plant. He cannot change its situation or properties. The man, on the other hand, has to accept some limitations, but nevertheless is called upon in his relationship to nature to treat the thing that is under him consciously, on the basis of what God had made it to be. The animal, the plant must do it; the man should do it. We are to use it, but we are not to use it as though it were nothing in itself.

(Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man, The Christian view of Ecology p 70, 71 Tyndale, 1970)