Today, Audrey, new in your mind.

Since the fall, do we still have the image of God?

Or was that image not only marred,

but was it obliterated by the fall

so that we are no longer the image bearers of God?

R.C. Sproul answers that question today from his classic series, Foundations.

Welcome to renewing your mind on the Saturday, I'm Lee Webb.

This is a comprehensive series in which R.C. addresses the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith.

He looked at how we got the Bible, the nature of sin, and the return of Christ.

And in today's lesson, he examines exactly what it means when Scripture states that you and I were created in the image of God.

When we looked at the doctrine of creation, I introduced that particular lecture by calling attention to the crisis in our day

and how so much of the criticism leveled by atheism and secularism against Judeo-Christianity fixes its gaze on the concept of creation, understanding that if they can cut the rug out from underneath creation, the whole system of Christianity collapses with it.

But not only are we faced with the crisis concerning the creation of the universe, creation in general, but specifically in our culture, we have seen a radical shift in understanding the origin of human beings.

We now have seen the advance of various types of theories of evolution, everything from microevolution to macroevolution and a host of nuances in between, which theories have significantly undermined human confidence in the dignity of our beginnings.

We frequently hear ourselves described as being cosmic accidents who emerged fortuitously out of the primordial soup as it were into our current evolutionary stage.

And I remember one philosopher who described the human situation as this, that we are at best grown up germs who have emerged from the slime gratuitously.

And we are sitting on one cog of one wheel of a vast cosmic machine that is destined toward annihilation.

And so with that view and with the widespread influence of pessimistic forms of existential philosophy, such as that indicated by Jean Paul Sartre, who defined man as a useless passion and whose final comment on the meaning and significance of humanity was the one word nausea.

And so we have been bombarded in the 20th century with extremely pessimistic views of the nature, the origin and the significance of human beings.

And yet ironically, at the same time we've seen a renaissance of naïve forms of humanism that still celebrate the dignity of human beings and who protest around the world in behalf of human rights as if we were more than grown up germs.

But I've been saying as others have for years that humanism in its naïvetay has both of its feet planted firmly in midair.

They're on a roller coaster without breaks because what they're doing is living on borrowed capital.

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