Among other exponents of neo-orthodoxy, Reinhold Niebuhr asserts the old conviction that God is creator of the world, above the contradiction of reason, both life and form, and the source of all existence. It is the divine spirit in man that enables him to place a meaning on life and on the world around him, for man must in some sense be detached if he is able to comment on the meaning of life. Man is like a passenger in a ship who cannot observe that the passenger in the seat opposite him is moving because all the passengers are in the same boat; in order to observe the motion of that boat and of the passengers in it, an observer must be elsewhere, perhaps on the shore or in another ship. In the same way everyone who extracts a meaning from life must have a detachment from life itself. To observe cause, sequence, and purpose, a man must somehow be able to view them as things apart; it requires a capacity of freedom which is greater than reason in order to make judgments above that reason. From the same source a man is able to detect evil which he finds to be located in the human will. Every judgment of good or bad presupposes an origin which is above good and bad. Sin actually is promoted by man's refusal to admit his limitations and by his ambition to be more than he is. Sin is the wrong use of the freedom which has its source in God, for though man is an individual, he is not self-sufficient. When he presumes to make himself self-sufficient, he sins in refusing to acknowledge the source of his life and his freedom.