Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (14 page)

Worldviews, then, include the pretheoretical in their basic character. Still, there are some notions that are difficult to place solely in these pretheoretical categories. Chief among these is the notion of God. Is God an innate pretheoretical concept, or does it derive from mental reflection or social or psychological implantation?

Sigmund Freud would, of course, take the latter view. For Freud, God does not exist. The idea, therefore, could not be innate, a result of human beings’ being made in the image of God or their receiving some revelation of God from God. The notion of God rather derives from the human need for consolation in a hostile world. It is a human invention. In fact, all religious doctrines are illusions, the result of wish fulfillment.
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This does not mean, of course, that the way anyone acquires the notion of God is theoretical. The idea may well be pretheoretical in the sense that it was acquired unconsciously. Religious ideas have “psychical origins”: “These which are given out as teachings are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.”
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But unlike the notion of space or time or being, God is not a conception we must have before we think about God. The idea of God is more like the idea of a king. We can learn about kings without having any preconception of what a king is. So we learn about God from our social context. As Freud says, “Think of the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult. I think it would be a very long time before a child who was not influenced began to trouble himself about things in another world.”
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Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, on the other hand, take the notion of God to be a direct perception of God’s existence, one unmediated by society or psychological need. Aquinas says, “To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature.”
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Calvin goes further. He says that everyone has a
sensus divinitatis
, a sense of deity:

Notice that it is God not just as abstract Being but as Creator that is grasped by the human mind. That would seem to include personhood as well. Whether or not the notion of any God is pretheoretical is itself a worldview matter. Alvin Plantinga is helpful here: “The
sensus divinitatis
is a disposition or set of dispositions to form theistic beliefs in various circumstances, in response to the sorts of conditions or stimuli that trigger the working of this sense of divinity.”
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So triggered by a starry sky, a magnificent mountain, a sense of guilt or any number of other natural stimuli, belief arises. Plantinga says, “I simply find myself with the belief in God.”
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This sense is not so much the conclusion of an argument as an intuitive grasp of an idea or a being who just comes to mind. In this sense, belief in God is like our belief that two plus two equals four. We just “see” that it does.
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For a Calvinist, and perhaps for other Christians as well, it is a pretheoretical concept; for a consistent naturalist, it is not and cannot be.

But this raises an interesting question. If the Calvinist is right, the naturalist has had, at least at one time, an intuitive grasp of the existence of God. The Calvinist would use as the authority for this Romans 1:18-20:

If, for example, Freud no longer intuits the existence of God, or no longer concludes God’s existence from his observation of the world around him, it is because he has suppressed the truth through his own wickedness. According to a Calvinist worldview, then, Freud may presuppose the final reality to be the material world, he may even give reasons for this presupposition, but he is both wrong and responsible for being wrong. He could and should have known better.

Calvin would say that the father’s obvious answer to his son’s question about what holds up the world is God. It is not a “no brainer,” for there are reasons for the intuition—the existence of the world around us. But confidence in this knowledge of the existence of God goes beyond any argument for it. It is predicated on the God-given human ability to sense God’s existence directly. Freud’s failure to sense God’s existence is due not so much to his intellectual as to his moral failure. The truth is there, not just in front of him (as the phenomena of the world) but in him (as the
sensus divinitatis
). As Pascal so intriguingly said, “The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
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Freud the naturalist, on the other hand, attributes belief in God to a psychological need for God. It is something that intelligent people—like Freud—must learn to do without. “Scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves.”
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The reason Calvin believes in God, Freud would say, is that he has failed to use his intelligence and has succumbed to his feeling of inadequacy. He has imagined what does not exist but what satisfies his inner lack.

The conflict boils down to this: either human beings are made in the image of a God with at least some human characteristics (Calvin), or God is made in the image of human beings (Freud). Arguments for both views depend on the same information. The question is, which is the origin of which—God the origin of human beings or human beings the origin of the concept of God?

If the case were really this simple, then what orients our lives—belief in God or belief in ourselves—would be solely a matter of a coin toss. If neither can refute the other’s argument and make a telling case for his own view, then the radical fideists are right. One is reduced to blind choice leading to blind faith.
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At this point in the argument, however, we ought not concede the case to the radical fideists. It may very well be that the case against Freud and others like him is very strong and that the case for the existence of God can be made with considerable rigor and justification.
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But the issue does illustrate the role that presuppositions have in both arguments and in orienting worldviews. (This issue is taken up again in chapter six.)

There is another way to consider the presuppositional nature of the concept of God. Take the first presupposition I identify in
The Universe Next Door
as the Christian worldview answer to the question, What is prime reality—the really real? The Christian answer is God. And who is God?

Except for the opening word, none of this answer is pretheoretical. It is, rather, a complex predication about the character of the “really real.” It is, in other words, a statement about being itself. God is the really real. God is being itself. But what is being? That is, what does it mean to say God is being? The pretheoretical part of this proposition is the concept of being itself, that is, the innate recognition of the difference between what is and what is not. We don’t know being by thinking about what being actually is but by pretheoretically grasping the notion.
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We intuitively know the difference between that which is and that which is not. There is no more primary concept. We can say that by “being” we mean “that which is,” or “isness,” but unless we have already grasped the concept, these rewordings mean no more than what the word
being
already means.

Thus all thought about any specific being—ourselves, the world around us, God or the gods—is founded on a pretheoretical given, a concept that we either get or don’t get. But this concept is so fundamental that it would not be possible for any normally functioning human being not to have it. One does not need to be particularly intelligent. The dullest persons who carry on meaningful conversations already grasp the distinction between being and not being. They may not be able to articulate the notion, but everything they say implies the distinction.

In short, it may be that what is truly pretheoretical is not the idea of God but the concept of being. That is, the concept of God may not be sufficiently primitive to be pretheoretical. It may not necessarily carry definitional content—personal or impersonal, Creator or emanater of the rest of reality, one or many.

If the apostle Paul were to weigh in on this issue, based on what he said in Romans 1:18-20, what would he say? “Eternal power and divine nature”: these are the attributes of God that Paul says everyone knows. Surely it is the Christian God—not Allah or Brahman—that Calvin says we know by our
sensus divinitatis
.

Perhaps, however, the apostle does not mean to include as many characteristics as Calvin implies. Calvin holds that God as Maker is intuited, but would he hold that the
sensus divinitatis
gives us access to all the traditional characteristics of the theistic God (infinite and personal [triune], transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign and good)? Except for good, these are all theoretical terms; their application to the concept of God can surely be seen as presuppositional, but are they also pretheoretical? How much theoretical content do “eternal power” and “divine nature” contain? If Paul is correct, does the pretheoretical include some theoretical content? I confess, I don’t know the answers to these questions. Rather than speculate, as a Christian I am content to leave them unanswered, at least for the moment.
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The existence of God is, of course, fundamental to worldview analysis. But what about other key worldview matters? There are some issues that cause our heart to beat faster, our brow to sweat, our psyche to boil, our spirit or soul or self or core of our being—whatever makes me
me
—to sag. If they are not dealt with, they can send us into not just a brown funk but a mental hospital. Take the problem of evil and pain. Why is there so much of it? Why do my friends suffer? And worse, why me too? But the most troubling of these issues is death. What happens to a person at death? I can’t believe I will live forever. Death is certain. So what will happen to me?

I am certain that something will happen to me at death. I can fantasize that I will not die, that I will continue to live as I have for the few or many years since my birth, but I cannot be certain which one of several options will be my fate. If I am to lay this question to rest with some sort of answer, it will not be—so it seems to me—because the answer is so certain that I cannot help but accept it. I do not mean that I do not or cannot have some confidence (Lesslie Newbigin would call it “proper confidence”) in a specific answer, say, reincarnation, resurrection, extinction or transformation to another state of being.
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I mean that none of these possibilities are anywhere near as certain as the simple fact that I will cease to live in my present bodily form.

I suggest, therefore, that some aspects of a worldview are presuppositional without being pretheoretical. That is, within the Christian worldview is the notion that at death each human being will continue in existence, eventually being resurrected either to a blissful life with God and his people or to a continued unhappy existence forever separated from God and all that brings joy. Some Christians probably could give little conscious reason to believe this (perhaps they are children and have picked it up from home and church), some could give a number of reasons that they find satisfactory, and some could give sophisticated justifications for their belief. But in the final analysis, the specific Christian concept of life after death, no matter how simple or complex, is a
belief
that is held on faith. But, of course, the same is true of naturalists who believe that all personal existence ends at death. Among naturalists who believe in extinction at death there is the same mix of people—some with no conscious reasons, some with some, some with many.

In short, the concept of death itself is pretheoretical—a given. The particular character of death is not. In an analogy suggested by cultural anthropologist Michael Kearney, every worldview has both bones and flesh.
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I suggest that the bones are pretheoretical, the flesh is presuppositional.

Foundations of the Foundational

Herman Dooyeweerd gives the presuppositional nature of worldviews a peculiarly theological twist by insisting that at root there are only two fundamental worldviews: the one originating from a ground motive (
grondmotief
) of people converted by God, all others originating from a ground motive of people still bound by sin.
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In doing this, he seems to be giving a foundation even to the pretheoretical notions I have identified, that is, a sort of subfoundation to what I have been calling a foundation. He locates the origin of human cognition in the central core of each person. If one is converted, one’s whole worldview at every level will be radically different from that of one who is not converted. Dooyeweerd writes,