Worldview Basics Part 2: What’s a Worldview and So What??!!

This Dicta sets forth Part 2 of a multi-part series that presents pithy Worldview building blocks outlined in bitesize digestible portions.  These will be tools for your toolboxes.  Today we focus on what exactly is a worldview and why it matters.  We trust this toolset will edify you as together we Inform the public, Equip the church, and Protect the future.

Many today wear glasses or contact lens.  Why?  These lens correct vision by bringing fuzziness into focus.  Sometimes we wear dark glasses to protect our eyes, thereby making seeing easier on bright days.

Now, if the lenses are calibrated correctly, does wearing them help us function?  Of course.  Where do we wear them?  On our belts?  On our legs?  No; we wear glasses properly on our faces to serve our eyesight.  Doing so helps us navigate reality – whether walking, driving, doing sports or surgery – more effectively.  Glasses make life better. So do worldviews, if they are correctly calibrated and properly “worn”.

So just what IS a worldview?  Our opinions?  Our desires? Our politics or political affiliations?  Do worldviews have a discernable structure?  Are they like a box of marbles?  Pearls on a string?  A spider web?  Let’s get to the gist.

Worldview Defined

Here is a working definition.  A worldview consists of a

Network of presuppositions through which one interprets all of human experience[1]

Let’s examine this a bit more closely: 

A network – worldviews link internally and relate like a spider web.  A web’s strength varies depending on the interrelationship of its strands; some portions are stronger than others, but all interrelate.

Of presuppositions:  Worldviews come to the cosmos with pre-cognitive commitments – that is, a person assumes or presupposes certain things that he has not independently verified or consciously “worked out” and embraced.  For example:  Persons can assume that:  the world is illusory or that the world is real; mankind is wholly material or he’s not; morality matters or merely reflects a survival device; tomorrow will be like today because nature is uniform, et al.

A filter, through which:  worldviews operate as a filter through which we experience our existence and thus drive our interpretation of all human experience:  whether God, the world, and/or Self.

Experience: how do we experience reality?  In several ways: rationally with thought; empirical observation (sense impression); emotional encounters, etc.   Worldviews impact, embrace, and/or rule out these modes of knowing.

Worldview Implications:  Naked Facts?

So what are some of the implications for this?  One big one is that – contrary to popular convention – the facts don’t speak for themselves.  There are no bare or brute facts.[2]  Rather, every fact is an interpreted fact, interpreted either by God or man or both.  And, worldviews set the parameters and plausibility for interpretation.  Thus, facts champion theories of fact. Thomas Sowell explains this point:

Evidence      is    fact      that discriminates between one theory and another.  Facts do not “speak for themselves.” They speak for or against competing theories.^[3]

Culture likewise engineers and molds worldviews and thus contributes to “what counts” as a “fact”.  Oxford scholar Larry Sidentop puts it this way, noting how Christianity functioned in society:

Every set of beliefs introduces its own logic and its own constraints. This was certainly true of Christianity. We can see this if we ask about the impact of Christian beliefs on law and government in the two or three centuries after the end of the Western empire in 476.^[4]

And, this dynamic occurs when doing cultural apologetics.  Tom Wright illustrates this using a current cultural issue:

My point is this: if you’re trying to have a discussion about God’s involvement in the world in one area – creation, science, whatever — while living and breathing a system in which God has been disinvolved with the world by definition and by act of congress, there is an opposition set up, deep within the structure of how people think, that is going to make it very difficult. That is why, I think, some of those who insist on God’s actions in creation and providence, who see him as a God who is essentially outside the whole process and who reaches in, despite the Epicurean prohibition, and does things for which there was otherwise no cause, sound quite shrill. They are desperately insisting on the truth of something that, at a structural and presuppositional level, has been ruled out of court, declared unconstitutional.[5]

Worldviews: What Do They Do?

What do worldviews do?  Every worldview answers three basic questions, which we mentioned in passing in Part 1.  Let’s probe this more specifically.

      Answering Three Fundamental Questions

What’s Real?  Worldviews commit to a particular view of “real reality,” what philosophers call metaphysics or the nature of being.      Is the physical world really real or is it illusory.[6] Is the physical all that exists?  Is everything simply “star stuff” and are we really “children of the stars” as Carl Sagan contended?[7]

Metaphysics also addresses whether things exist that are absolute, abstract, and universal or whether only particulars exist.  To illustrate:  are there only ducks or is “duckness” real, in the sense of the concept being absolute, abstract, and universal?  What about “justice” or “fairness” or “love”?  Worldviews rule in – and rule out – such concepts.

What do we know?  Worldviews also presuppose how knowledge is known.  Do we know by thinking?  Do we know from observation?  Do we know from revelation?[8]  Do we ONLY know from thinking (rationalism); do we ONLY know from sense experience and observation (empiricism)?  Depending on our worldview presuppositions, they shape how and what we know and can know.  And, therefore, they shape “what counts” as evidence and facts.

How should we act?  Worldviews also impact how we live or ethics.  If someone says, “I love children; they’re delicious” – I trust you would be disturbed by this cannibalistic contention.  But, how OUGHT we to love our neighbor?  Says who?  To press the point:  Professor Arthur Leff pushes the more general point, highlighting the need for a knowable transcendent standard, yet ignoring its true source himself:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot-and General Custer too-have earned salvation. Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now:] Sez who? God help us.^[9]

Telling a Fundamental Story

As noted in Part 1, worldviews also tell a story.  Let’s probe this more deeply.  Worldviews inform us (1) What’s Original; (2) What went wrong; and (3) What’s the solution – in other words, worldviews each posit their own version of Creation – Fall – and Redemption, aping the Christian reality.  How does this work?

Consider Marxism.  In this system “creation” consists of dialectical materialism.  The advent of private property comprises the “fall” – what’s wrong with the world.  And, “redemption” occurs by revolution that throws off the bourgeois and establishes the rise and rule of the worker, the proletariat.  Marxists and those who are Marx-adjacent view human experience through that story, the oppressed battling the oppressor as History matches to a Hegelian melody.

Or consider Eastern thought, like Hinduism or Buddhism.  “Creation” consists of the Absolute undifferentiated being – monism or Oneism.  The “fall” occurs when desire enters leading to distinctions, disturbing Absolute being, pretending distinctions exist when in reality they are illusory.  This story redeems things when people awaken and realize their Self is really the Divine Self.  In classic Hinduism in its Vedic story, this enlightenment occurs when the particular self – Atman – realizes he’s Brahman, the universal transcendent Self.[10]

Theologian Vern Poythress furthers illustrates how the story – Creation, Fall, and Redemption – echoes throughout many different counterfeit, that is, non-Christian worldviews:

Consider one such counterfeit. In the ancient world, the Babylonian story Enuma Elishsaid that one of the goddesses, Tiamat, waged war against the others. Tiamat’s conflict symbolizes a disruption of normality. Tiamat plays the role of villain in her destructive rampage. Marduk, the patron god of Babylon responds to the challenge of disruption, fights against Tiamat, defeats her, and receives the rewards of victory. The story clearly has a “redemptive” theme in a broad sense. Marduk is the hero who defeats the villain and redeems the situation. 

The story need not be ritualistic with tapestries, smells and bells to be deeply religious.  Consider the Enlightenment’s story:

Even if people do not believe in gods and goddesses, they can have counterfeit stories of redemption. In the West the spirit of the Enlightenment tells a counterfeit story of redemption in which Reason the hero rescues the princess, Western civilization, from the villain Superstition, who appears in many guises: belief in witchcraft, belief in evil spirits, and belief in mystifying religion. 

Here’s his take on Marxism:

A number of people have recognized that classic Marxism has a redemptive plot that counterfeits Christian hope [citation omitted] Instead of sin, as understood within the context of Christian theology, Marxism has the oppression of the workers.

Instead of Christ’s triumph over sin, Marxism has the communist revolution.

Instead of the gospel it has the call for workers to unite and cast off their chains. The communist party is the vanguard announcing the gospel and the nucleus of the new society, so it is analogous to the Christian church.

And the coming communist society of prosperity and peace is the analogue of biblical hope for the new heaven and the new earth. Instead of God, the laws of history propel humanity toward its utopian goal. The climactic tipping point, the communist revolution, brings the death and resurrection of political and economic structures, through with the new world is inaugurated.^[11] 

Worldviews and YOU

Os Guinness has frequently noted that “contrast in the mother of clarity.”[12]  Part 3 of this series will delve into comparing and contrasting even more worldviews and their facets. 

This sort of Basic Worldview teaching can be customized for your church or group through our TxC Intensives.  For more information, please contact TxC.

And, finally, forget about the Force being with you.  Instead,

      The LORD bless you and keep you;

      the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

      the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.[13]

---

[1] Derived from the teaching of Greg L. Bahnsen.

[2] John M. Frame, A Van Til Glossary, https://frame-poythress.org/a-van-til-glossary/

[3]Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle (2007), 6 

[4] Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014), 126

[5] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues (2014), 15-16

[6] Many Eastern worldviews like Hinduism contend that physicality is Maya or illusion.  Also, Gnosticism, while not denying the physical, deemphasis it.

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–fGnkgYDKo; this is a classic “modern” view of Oneism, contending all of reality is and only is physical.

[8] A worldview commitment that in advance rules out a personal speaking God – like materialism or atheism – excludes this category out of hand.

[9] Arthur Allen Leff, Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2724&context=dlj

[10] Brahman and Atman:  That Art Thou, https://pluralism.org/brahman-and-atman-that-art-thou

[11] Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning was the Word: Language – A God-Centered Approach (2009), 220-221

[12] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11159645-as-always-contrast-is-the-mother-of-clarity-and-the

[13] Numbers 6:24-26