no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from nonpersonal sources — Francis Schaeffer

"The Bible states that this God who is personal created man in His own image.… God is personal, & man is also personal.

It might be helpful to illustrate the situation in this way.
Imagine you are in the Alps, and from a high vantage point you can see three parallel ranges of mountains with two valleys in between.  In one valley there is a lake, but the other is dry.  Suddenly you begin to witness what sometimes happens in the Alps; a lake forming in the second valley where there was none before.  As you see the water rising, you may wonder what its source is.  If it stops at the same level as the lake in the neighboring valley, you may, after careful measurements, conclude that there is a possibility that the water has come from the first valley.  But if your measurement shows that the level of the second lake is twenty feet higher than the first, then you can no longer consider that its source may be from the neighboring valley and you would have to seek another explanation.  Personality is like that; no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from nonpersonal sources.

Therefore, biblical Christianity has an adequate and reasonable explanation for the source and meaning of human personality.  Its source is sufficient — the personal God on the high order of Trinity.  Without such a source men are left with personality coming from the impersonal (plus time, plus chance).

The two alternatives are very clearcut.  Either there is a personal beginning to everything, or one has what the impersonal throws up by chance out of the time sequence.  The fact that the second alternative may be veiled by connotation words makes no difference.  The words used by Eastern pantheism; the theological words such as Tillich’s “Ground of Being”; the secular shift from mass to energy or motion — all eventually come back to the impersonal, plus time, plus chance.  If this is really the only answer to man’s personality, then personality is no more than an illusion, a kind of sick joke which no amount of semantic juggling will alter.  Only some form of mystical jump will allow us to accept that personality comes from impersonality.  This was the position into which Teilhard de Chardin was forced. His answer is only a mystical answer of words.

Because these men will not accept the only explanation which can fit the facts of their own experience, they have become metaphysical magicians.  No one has presented an idea, let alone demonstrated it to be feasible, to explain how the impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, can give personality.  We are distracted by a flourish of endless words, and lo, personality has appeared out of the hat!  This is the water rising above its source.  No one in all the history of humanistic, rationalistic thought has found a solution.  As a result, either the thinker must say man is dead, because personality is a mirage; or else he must hang his reason on a hook outside the door and cross the threshold into the leap of faith which is the new level of despair.

A man like Sir Julian Huxley has clarified the dilemma by acknowledging, though he is an atheist, that somehow or other, against all that one might expect, man functions better if he acts as though God is there.  This sounds like a feasible solution for a moment, the kind of answer a computer might give if you fed the sociological data into it.  God is dead, but act as if He were alive.  However, a moment’s reflection will show what a terrible solution this is.  Ibsen, the Norwegian, put it like this: if you take away a man’s lie, you take away his hope. These thinkers are saying in effect that man can only function as man for an extended period of time if he acts on the assumption that a lie (that the personal God of Christianity is there) is true.  You cannot find any deeper despair than this for a sensitive person.  This is not an optimistic, happy, reasonable or brilliant answer.  It is darkness and death.

Imagine that a universe existed which was made up only of liquids and solids, and no free gases.  A fish was swimming in this universe.  This fish, quite naturally, was conformed to its environment, so that it was able to go on living.  But let us suppose that by blind chance, as the evolutionists would have us believe, this fish developed lungs as it continued swimming in this universe without any gases.  Now this fish would no longer be able to function and fulfill its position as a fish.  Would it then be higher or lower in its new state with lungs?  It would be lower, for it would drown.  In the same way, if man has been kicked up by chance out of what is only impersonal, then those things that make him man — hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication — are ultimately unfulfillable and are thus meaningless.  In such a situation, is man higher or lower?  He would then be the lowest creature on the scale.  The green moss on the rock is higher than he, for it can be fulfilled in the universe which exists.  But if the world is what these men say it is, then man (not only individually but as a race), being unfulfillable, is dead.  In this situation man should not walk on the grass, but respect it — for it is higher than he!"

— Francis A. Schaeffer (1982). The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer: a Christian worldview. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.