Which is fundamental to reality: persons or impersonal structures? Your answer to this question determines whether you see life as a great, beautiful adventure, or if you are living in a gray world of particle collisions. You will have to stretch your minds a little when reading this post, but it is worth doing!
John Frame acknowledges the influence of Francis Schaeffer as he articulates this thought in Apologetics to the Glory of God (pages 35-37):
The great question confronting modern humanity is this: Granted that the universe contains both persons (like you and me) and impersonal structures (like matter, motion, chance, time, space, and physical laws), which is fundamental? Is the impersonal aspect of the universe grounded in the personal, or is it the other way around? Secular thought generally assumes the latter–that persons are the products of matter, motion, chance, and so on. It holds that to explain a phenomenon in terms of personal intentions (e.g., “This house is here because someone built it live in”) is less than an ultimate explanation, a fully satisfying explanation, requires the house because of the ultimacy of the impersonal (e.g. “The person built the house because the atoms in his brain moved about in certain ways”). But is that a necessary assumption?
Let us think of the consequences of each. If the impersonal is primary, then there is no consciousness, no wisdom, and no will in the ultimate origin of things. What we call reason and value are the unintended, accidental consequences of chance events. (So why should we trust reason, if it is only the accidental result of irrational happenings?) Moral virtue will, in the end, be unrewarded. Friendship, love, and beauty are all of no ultimate consequence for, they are reducible to blind, uncaring process . . .
But if the personal is primary, then the world was made according to a rational plan that can be understood by rational minds. Friendship and love are not only profound human experiences, but fundamental ingredients of the whole world order. There is someone who wants there to be friendship, who wants there to be love. Moral goodness, too, is part of the great design of the universe. If personality is absolute, there is one who cares about what we do, who approves or disapproves of our conduct. And that person has some purpose for evil, too, mysterious as that may seem to use . . . Beauty, too, does not just happen for a while; it is the art of a great craftsman. And if indeed the solar system comes to a “vast death,” there is one who can deliver us from that death, if it pleases him to do so. So it may be that some of our thoughts, plans, trust, love, and achievements have eternal consequences after all, consequences that impart to all these things a great seriousness, but also humor: humor at the ironic comparison of our trivial efforts with “eternal consequences.”
What a difference! Instead of a gray world of matter and motion and chance, in which anything could happen, but nothing much (nothing of human interest) ever does, the world would be the artistic creation of the greatest mind imaginable, with a dazzling beauty and fascinating logic. It would be a history with a drama, a human interest, a profound subtlety and allusiveness more illuminating than the greatest novelist could produce. That divine history would have a moral grandeur that would turn all the world’s evil to good. Most amazingly: the world would be under the control of a being somehow, wonderfully, akin to ourselves! Could we pray to him? Could we know him as a friend? Or would we have to flee from him as our enemy? What would he expect of us? What incredible experiences might have in store for us? What new knowledge? What blessings? What curses?
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