Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (24 page)

Nonetheless, it is extremely helpful to have a thumbnail sketch of the major worldviews present today, especially those that impinge on our lives through the conversations we have with others, the literature we read, and the movies and TV programs that we watch. Every editorial, even every news story, is written from a point of view, one that tries to be objective or that is openly ideological. Every movie and TV drama conveys a take on life, some more obviously than others, but none with no worldview implications at all. Most sitcoms, for example, depict twisted and perverted lives and values as if they were not only normal but right. The biblical God rarely appears even as a backdrop. Knowing what these alternative worldviews may be helps us view movies and shows more wisely.

Every worldview described in
The Universe Next Door
is alive and well and living somewhere in the world. It is in fact what makes our world pluralistic. When deism began to be culturally significant, Christian theism did not disappear; when naturalism became dominant, both deism and Christianity remained; when nihilism dawned in the late nineteenth century, naturalism, deism and Christianity were still present; and so forth. In fact, naturalism remains today as the dominant worldview in Europe and on university campuses in North America, while a vague, unsophisticated deism dominates the broader North American world. Most people in America believe in God, but it makes little difference in their life; he exists as someone or some force to get the world going and to give it order, but he can be largely ignored in daily life.

The fifth edition of
The Universe Next Door
outlines and analyzes the worldview of Islam. Here that worldview is placed last, not because it is new in history, but because it has emerged as a major player in the Western world. Moreover, by the end of the twentieth century, it had become obvious that the Islamic worldview is so radically different from others in the West that it has been difficult to comprehend, even though in its many versions it is so clearly and globally displayed in current events.

Islam’s view of the “really real,” for example, is of prime importance. God as solely One or God as Trinity; Jesus as human prophet or Jesus as the divine-human prophet and savior; God as loving sinners or God as loving only the righteous; God as forgiving us through the sacrifice of his Son or God as being merciful without a redemptive action; human destiny as inexorable fate or as involving some human choice; the Qur’an as God’s very words in Arabic or the Bible as God’s Word through the instrument of various languages. These are not trivial differences, and their implications for individuals and culture in general are profound. We even need to understand various Islamic traditions whose views are different enough to have caused violent controversy in the past and are the background for violent controversy today.

Worldviews in an Academic Setting

Early in my academic life, worldview analysis opened up for me through English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I could read it, but I couldn’t understand it until I grasped such notions as the Great Chain of Being (an intellectual model that forms the backdrop to hierarchy in both church and state), the Tudor myth that illuminates Shakespeare’s history plays, the Copernican breaking of the circle and the ensuing rejection of the medieval model of the spherical universe (which makes sense of the poetry of John Donne). It was not long before worldview analysis became for me one of the most important tools of literary analysis.

Worldview analysis relates to literary study not just in helping readers grasp the meaning of specific texts but in revealing the assumptions of literary theory. Terry Eagleton’s
Literary Theory: An Introduction
bristles with remarks, some of them reflecting deeply held assumptions, that are in conflict with a Christian worldview.
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Here are only two of many:

The not very hidden assumption here is that human beings have no essential common nature, that they are constructed by their language or their actions. Not so, a Christian must protest. We are what we are not by being creatures in society but by being in the image of God. There is a Presence that makes our identity distinctively what it is. Shakespeare—the writer who most fully displays the character of humanity—will always be able to be understood and appreciated, as will be Aeschylus and Homer, Cervantes and Goethe, Dante and Tolkien, Dickinson and Woolf. We grasp the humanity of those who left their marks on the caves of Lascaux thousands of years ago. There is a human nature.

In the past several decades, Christian literary scholarship has begun to become more self-consciously Christian, and while I have not noticed much use of worldview analysis in this scholarship, I am delighted to see it begin to proliferate.
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The field of philosophy is certainly the discipline where one finds the fullest penetration of Christian thought. Encouraged in the mid-twentieth century by Harry Jellema at Calvin College and Arthur F. Holmes at Wheaton College, Christian students have gone on to major universities, received their PhDs and contributed at the highest level of academic performance. Working from the perspective of a self-consciously held Christian worldview, they have done important scholarly work in every field of philosophy.
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But that’s literature and philosophy. How do worldviews relate to other disciplines?
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The story is the same. Every academic discipline, including the sciences, is undergirded by a set of assumptions that may not even be conscious. Here are a few that relate not just to the sciences but to all disciplines.

First is the notion of the orderliness of the universe. If the universe is not lawlike in its operations, no theories can be tested even if they were able to be formulated.

Second is a reliance on the intellectual capacity of the scholar. The mind is assumed to be able to understand what it investigates.

Third, academic work since the Renaissance, rejecting the notion that we can deduce the nature of the universe from self-evident premises, assumes the contingency of the universe. The universe does not have to be the way it is. It could have been otherwise. So the task of understanding involves looking to see it more clearly, again with the assumption that the human mind is capable of doing this.

These assumptions cannot be proved, but they must be true if science is to give us genuine knowledge. This, in fact, has been accepted (consciously or unconsciously) by virtually all working scientists and, until the postmodern age, most other scholars as well. What is not usually noticed is that these foundational notions are not self-evident. For science to proceed, they are necessary assumptions, but they are not necessarily true.

When the young boy asks his father, “What holds up the world?” the father is forced to see that his answer is based on something he cannot finally prove or perhaps even understand. “God made the world to hang in space,” or “That’s just the way it is. Orderly matter and energy in a complex relationship: that’s all there is.” When one gets to the bottom, then, one is faced with naming the elephant. One must make a
pretheoretical
or
presuppositional
commitment.

The academic world is faced with the same questions and the same alternatives as the father. What holds up the world? Why is it orderly? Science itself was born from the Christian worldview that held that the universe is orderly because an omniscient and omnipotent God intended to make a world that reflected his own intelligence.
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The universe is orderly because God is Logos (intelligence itself). That was a commitment—a presupposition—lodged in the heart of most early scientists. It is not the commitment lodged in the mind of most scholars now.

Today naturalism is dominant. There simply is no academic discipline—whether in the arts and humanities, the social sciences or the natural sciences—that takes as its starting assumption the notion of a God who has created both the scholars and the world they are studying.

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be” was openly stated by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, but it is the unstated assumption of every academic discipline.
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God is not just unnecessary; he is irrelevant and even embarrassing. Biologist Richard Dawkins has only to say that fellow would-be scientist Michael Behe believes in God (which he does), and anything Behe proposes is automatically suspect, not even worth evaluating on its merits.
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Naturalism reigns.

I think, in fact, that most Christians in the natural sciences, while being fully theistic in their overall worldview, are
methodological naturalists
in their scientific work. That is, they assume that as far as science is concerned, they do not need (and would even be encumbered by) the notion of God. Science deals with natural explanations of natural phenomena. There may be other explanations, but they belong in philosophy or theology or history or psychology or sociology. They do not belong in science qua science. God has designed and made the world; he has made us in his image. This explains the orderliness of the cosmos and the ability we have to understand it. But, they say, we do not need to call on any of this background for the scientific work we do. We can work alongside scientists who are metaphysical naturalists (that is, those who believe in no God at all) or pantheists (who believe that nature itself is divine), because the work we do does not require these metaphysical notions.

While methodological naturalism has been the dominant position taken by Christians in the sciences, it has recently been challenged by scientists and philosophers who argue for design science. This is not the place for me to take sides in this controversy.
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My own view is that the issue is not yet—and may never be—resolved. My only certainty is that God is always in relation to his creation as Creator. He upholds the universe by his word of power (Heb 1:3). John Henry Newman said it well:

Christian scholarship undergirded by such specifically Christian assumptions may be an “outrageous idea,” as George Marsden has put it, but that is because naturalism is such a powerful paradigm in academic circles. The suggestions Marsden makes in
The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship
are eminently reasonable,
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and it is a delight to see some of this scholarship on traditionally nonreligious topics emerge and contend in the marketplace of ideas.

At the moment naturalism reigns even in the field of religious studies. It is not God who is the object of investigation. It is
belief in
God. As one theologian at the University of Aarhus in Denmark once told me, “The systematic theologian at my university is an atheist.” This is tantamount, of course, to being an astronomer who does not believe in stars but believes that people believe in stars, so that’s what she studies. Theology then becomes the study of what theologians say or what and why people believe in God. In other words, theology becomes history, or anthropology, or sociology. People do not believe in God because God exists but because they are caught in a web of former belief, or they feel the need for a Father who is better than their own father, or they have not yet outgrown the need for a magical figure whom they hope will reward them, if not now, in a later life—or for some other totally natural cause. One must not say that these natural factors are not present, only that these are not all the factors there are, and that in fact the most important factor has been summarily dismissed. It is God in whom we live and move and have our being. Not to recognize that is to become futile in our imagination and have our senseless minds darkened.

Elephant All the Way Down

The world today is marked by two seemingly equal and opposite characteristics. On the one hand, we are surrounded by people who view the world very differently from us. On the other hand, all of us hold so tightly to our worldview that it operates for each individual as if it were the only worldview.

In broad terms, for example, there are New Agers and atheists, deists and pantheists, Christians and Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists. The worldviews of each group lead them to live lives very different from each other. At the same time, within each group each person holds a worldview with unique features, often contrary to those of others in the group. Pluralism reigns both between and within groups.

One might think therefore, that no one would hold his or her worldview tightly. But that is not the case. Pluralism certainly puts pressure on everyone to adopt relativism, but mostly it does not succeed. In fact, each person in every group holds his or her worldview so firmly that, if we look closely, we can discern much of its character by what we see that person do and say. The fact is, however, that we usually do not look closely. As a result we often fail to understand why other people—even in our own group—vary so widely in their beliefs.
Why do they not agree with us more fully than they do?
we wonder. And in the United States almost all of us are still utterly baffled by the mindset of the terrorists of 9/11. Their actions are radically contrary to good sense as we understand it.