Worldviews: Alleged and Actual

This morning I finished James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004).

One idea that struck me in a new way was that worldviews are not merely intellectual but encompass the whole person. So often in philosophical circles (of whatever persuasion), worldviews are discussed as systems of thought that correspond to reality and have internal coherence (to a greater or lesser degree). While we have an intuition that we should be living according to our worldview, we rarely dwell on this idea when discussing worldviews as such. But Sire quotes approvingly from Wilhelm Dilthey that worldviews are arrived at intellectually in the cognition of reality, affectively in the appraisal of life, and volitionally in the active performance of will.

In other words, worldviews are not merely how we say we view reality but how we actually view reality, as demonstrated by our affections and actions. For this reason, perhaps Kuyper's life system is a preferable term to denote what we are talking about here. Sire summarizes this insight and offers a pointed application to Christian believers:

The point is, our worldview is not precisely what we may state it to be. It is what is actualized in our behavior. We live our worldview or it isn't our worldview. What we actually hold, for example, about the nature of fundamental reality may not be what we say.

Here is a simple test. On one side of a sheet of paper, write what you believe about prayer. Now turn over the sheet and write down how much and how often you pray. Or vary that. On one side of a sheet of paper, write what you believe about God that supports what you believe about prayer. Now turn over the sheet and write what your prayer life indicates about what you really believe about God. Christians are often less spiritual that their stated worldview would require (133).

I think Sire's analysis is a clarion call, not merely for individual believers, but for Christian educational institutions whose expressed goal is to provide their students with a Christian worldview. Apply yourself wholly to the text. Apply the text wholly to yourself wrote the famous scholar and pietist Johann Albrecht Bengel. While this is obviously challenging in a formal academic setting, I think there is plenty of room to integrate all aspects of the Christian worldview into a Christian educational experience. Though this is a formidable challenge, I think all parties involved will find it worth the effort.

On Philosophical Clarity

I always enjoy a barely intelligible philosophical quote. Here is one from Hegel that I came across this morning. He is attempting to defining worldview:

Starting with a specific character of this sort, there is formed and established a moral outlook on the world [moralische Weltanschauung] which consists in a process of relating the implicit aspect of morality and the explicit aspect. This relation presupposes both thorough reciprocal indifference and specific Independence as between nature and moral purposes and activity; and also on the other side, a conscious sense of duty as the sole essential fact, and of nature as entirely devoid of independence and essential significance of its own. The moral view of the world [Die moralische Weltanschauung], the moral attitude, consists in the development of the moments which are found present in this relation of such entirely antithetic and conflicting presuppositions (as quoted in James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept [Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004], 24 n. 3).

That's a real life changer!

Two Views of Gratitude

My most recent reading project was James W. Sire and Carl Peraino, Deepest Differences: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009). Sire is a longtime editor at InterVarsity Press and wrote The Universe Next Door, a classic Christian presentation of worldviews. Peraino is a retired research biochemist who has performed important research in oncology.

In the prefatory material, the two authors starkly but subtly paint their contrasting views of life. On the one hand, Sire thanks God for giving him a long life with and a mind fascinated by the mysteries of God and his universe. On the other hand, Peraino feels fortunate that he emerged into sentience in a relatively benign environment via the concatenation of innumerable chance events spanning millions of years of evolution.

Peraino is willing to bite the bullet of his own reductionist worldview here. I appreciate and respect that. His statement strikes me as a modern example of what Paul was writing about in Romans 1:21-22.

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