Basic HTML Version
Why You Should Read This Book
To millions of people, life seems both meaningless and absurd.
Science, technology, even philosophy and theology, have pictured
human beings as mere creatures of chance. Yet, consciously or not,
men and women find it difficult to accept a purposeless existence.
Violence, protests and rebellion, experimentation with drugs—these
are, in many cases, the irrational expressions of people struggling
with their appalling lostness. Like orphans they cry out from their
loneliness and despair, “Who am I? Who were my parents? Why
did they give me up? How can I find them?”
Many turn to science for answers, tuning our great radio tele-
scopes in on the heartbeat of the stars, as if to ask, Is there anyone
out there who knows me? Who cares for me? But science has no
answer. Science is set up to ask questions: How is an atom con-
structed? How is it split? How do our minds work? How is the
universe constructed?
It cannot tell us why there is an atom, why human beings ex-
ist, why there is a universe at all. Nor can it answer those unique
questions that concern thinking people:
If there is meaning and justice in the universe, why do the inno-
cent suffer with the guilty?
Is there life after death? Does the human personality live on?
Do today’s Christian churches really speak for God? What is
truth?
What is the future of the world? Will it end with the whimper of
a child struggling for a last breath in polluted atmosphere, or with the
bang of atomic hell unleashed from cherry-red ICBM nose cones?
Or will humans—who in recorded history never have demonstrated
the ability to control their own basic selfishness—suddenly succeed
in banishing evil, war, poverty and even death?
[6]
This book gives the answers, and they are reassuring. Life does
have meaning! We are not alone in the universe. Someone out
there cares! Someone, indeed, who has involved Himself in human
iii