If you were to go out on the streets of any city in our country and ask this simple question, “Is man basically good?” you would be surprised at how many would answer in the affirmative.

I have been enjoying the book, The Story of Reality, by Greg Koukl. He made this observation, “Man is beautiful, but is also broken. Yes, man is noble, but he is also cruel.” He says these two facts about human beings are so obvious that any view of the world must account for them. And it must do so in a way that makes sense.

H.G. Wells was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. He wrote novels, books on history, politics, and social commentary, as well as college textbooks and rules for war games. He was a great thinker who, as a young intellectual, believed in the perfectibility of man and society.

In 1920 he published an extraordinarily ambitious work, Outline of History, which also served as his unabashed declaration of idealism. Each page conveyed an unshakeable faith in progress and a conviction of complete optimism for the future. However, a mere thirteen years later, in his book, The Shape of Things to Come, Wells had clearly shifted perspectives; now, his writing, rather than being optimistic, related the stubbornness and selfishness of people and governments. So radically altered was his consciousness that he even went so far as to maintain that the only solution for mankind was for the intellectual elite (which, naturally, included Wells) to take control of the entire world, forcibly changing people’s lives through compulsory education. Twelve years later, in 1945 and shortly before his death, he completed his final work, The Mind at the End of its Tether. In it he concluded that

“there is no way out, or around, or through the impasse . . .”

Wells concluded there is no help for mankind.

Koukl contends that modern leaders believe that the badness you see in people is because society has failed them in some way. They believe it is primarily caused by a lack of education or poverty (or both). They believe if you eliminate ignorance and poverty, crime would pretty much be eliminated.

Though these are popular ideas, Koukl says this is just nonsense. “The rich and educated may not get caught as often, but they are no more noble than the ignorant and the poor. Improving education provides opportunity for economic improvement, but it does not make people better. It has merely produced more literate and therefore, more clever criminals.”

Ignorance and poverty do not get to the real root of man’s brokenness. The biblical worldview is quite clear. All human beings have sinful, depraved hearts. Yet few people today seem to believe that the violence and destructiveness we are seeing from people is a visible manifestation of a selfish, sinful heart. Modern people do not believe in the prophet, Jeremiah, and his description of the human heart, that it is “…more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) Jesus said, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adultery, theft…” (Matthew 15:18)

This is not a popular message in today’s culture. Still, I believe that it offers the only plausible explanation for what is happening in our world.

Dr. Robert Coles is an exceptional man. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, he has written more than eighty books. He is also a renowned child psychiatrist and former literature professor at Harvard University. I shared this story a number of years ago in a blog, but I’d like to revisit it because it provides a meaningful conclusion to this piece.

Coles has spent his lifetime interviewing and listening to people. What did he learn about the human condition? Here’s his conclusion:

Nothing I have discovered about the makeup of human beings contradicts in any way what I learn from the Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, and from the book of Ecclesiastes, and from Jesus and the lives of those he touched. Anything I can say as a result of my research into human behavior is a mere footnote to those lives in the Old and New Testaments.

I have known human beings who, in the face of unbearable daily stress, respond with resilience, even nobility. And I have known others who live in a comfortable, even luxurious environment and seem utterly lost. We have both sides in each all of us, and that’s the Bible says, isn’t it?

Cole says that he receives a great deal of criticism from those in his profession because he speaks of human nature in terms of good and evil, light and darkness, self-destruction and redemption. He says, “They want some new theory, I suppose. But my research merely verifies what the Bible has said all along about human beings.”

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.