All we have said so far raises a great problem. If God created us with loving purposes in mind, if we share qualities that have their counterpart in God himself, if we are his personal representatives, put here to care for his creation, and if we are meant to be enjoying a loving relationship with him and with one another, why is the world in such a mess? To deny that something is wrong is simply to be dishonest or bury our heads in the sand.

Leighton Ford, in The Jesus Generation, asks the question:

What is wrong with the world when promises are not enough and we must have contracts; when doors are not enough and we need locks; when laws are not enough and we need police. What is wrong with the world when education has dispelled so much ignorance and raised the literacy rate, yet the worst wars in history have been fought by the most literate nations. What is wrong with the world when government and labour and business produce an affluent society, but cannot deal with the spiralling rate of crime, suicide, drug addiction and moral breakdown.

Whatever the problem is, it is quite obvious that it has something to do with human nature. Any philosophy or religion that ignores this question is no more likely to come up with a realistic solution than a doctor is likely to be able to help a patient when he ignores the reality of that patient's cancer. How is it that humans can rise to such heights of artistic creation, moral goodness and personal self-sacrifice, and yet sink to such depths of depravity, moral cruelty and self-centredness? The seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, highlighted the heart of the problem when he declared:

What a chimera is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.