On Worldviews

Worldviews have been trapped on the top of my brain for a while now. That’s probably not a bad thing, but it might not be a good thing, either. When I worked through the slides on worldviews for our Narrative Study, I put together a sort of chart on the basic worldviews there are out there. Through this thinking process, I’ve changed my view a little, and so, hence, a new chart.

Note that no chart can ever truly express the different worldviews, no matter how much you might try to get it right. It’s like the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism, everyone has a slightly different view of things, so you can never really pin down a single definition. On the other hand, making such charts is helpful, because they are an aid to understanding. There are, in essence, only three ways to know anything in the world. Either you know it because you’ve rationalized it from some sort of first principles, you know it because you’ve experienced it, or you know it because you trust some revelation from outside the time and space we live in. At bottom, these are the only ways of knowing anything. At bottom, there are also three ways of viewing the spiritual world. There is either no god, there is one god, there are many gods, or everything is god. I’ve not included polytheism, the belief in many gods, here, simply because it’s not all that common of a view in today’s world. What mostly passes for polytheism is normally some form of pantheism, or the belief that everything is god.

It’s interesting to intersect these two takes on worldviews and see what we come up with. For instance, an atheist rationalist almost always ends up in communitarianism, which is either fascism, communism, or one of the variants of socialism. An atheist empiricist almost always winds up in hedonism—eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. In other words, be all the animal you can be, since you’re an animal anyway.You can, of course, see combinations of these two, but again, charts like this aren’t perfect.

If you are a monotheist, and you believe revelation above what you think and what you experience, then you end up in Islam, or something similar, for the most part. If you are a pantheist, and mostly try to know by thinking, you tend to end up in the New Age. There is a good bit of experiential overlap here, but the primary mode of knowing is still to think. On the other hand, it you’re an pantheistic empiricist, you wind up in something like Buddhism. Again, there is overlap, but it fits in a rough and ready way.

There is, of course, two worldviews that do not fit purely into the rationalist, empiricist, or purely revelation based mold, Christianity and Judaism. Why? Because Christians believe there is an underlying revelation, but that God gave us our minds to think through what He has told us. God, Himself, says for us to reason with Him, and that we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds. At the same time, experience is not completely tossed out. Christianity and Judaism must both “fit” with the way humans actually are, and the way history has actually unfolded, to be considered true in any sense of the word. Hence, these two religions, representing, as it were, a single worldview, don’t “fit” into any single category very neatly. This is actually a bit of a change from the slides in the Narrative Study, but, well, I’m the blogger, and I’m allowed to change my mind.

What this means for a Christian is this: When you look around at the world, it’s easy to see the three pronged attack against Christianity. Islam states Christianity’s revelation is wrong, science says Christianity’s thinking is wrong, and the New Age says Christianity’s experience is wrong. Within the Christian Church, we have the same sorts of movements. The Catholics claim the Bible is not a final authority, the Emergent Church claims our experiences are not given enough weight, and the higher critics claim we don’t think well enough.

The reality is that we need to correlate God’s revelation with our experience and thinking, to take God’s revelation as ultimate truth because it fits our experience, because it helps us to understand our experiences, and because it gives us a foundation on which to be rational, to think about the world. Only in this way will we arrive at truth (or Truth).