Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (15 page)

Dooyeweerd is not easy to understand. As best I can make out, he is saying that the relationship to God of a redeemed and regenerated believer stands at the source of his or her worldview.
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The converted have a Christian worldview; the unconverted can’t even begin to grasp what that worldview might be. To see from a Christian perspective, one must be a Christian. In some Reformed scholars this has reinforced, if not led to, a rejection of any rational apologetic for the Christian faith. The unconverted can in no way grasp the force of a case for Christianity. The gospel is thus only to be proclaimed, not argued for.

What interests me here, however, is Dooyeweerd’s location of the source of worldviews in the
pre
-pretheoretical spiritual core of each human being. I agree. The foundation of the foundations is pretheoretical.

An Ontological Perspective

All of the ruminations above focus on epistemological issues. What if we step back and remind ourselves that it is ontology that precedes epistemology? Before something can be rightly theoretical, pretheoretical or presuppositional, that which constitutes it must exist. That is, if the theoretical, pretheoretical and presuppositional represent reality more or less accurately, that reality must be there to be represented. From a realist ontological perspective, the object of knowledge controls the way knowledge of the object will be able to be apprehended.

Material objects present themselves to us in their materiality, and if we know them, we know them in relationship to what they are. A city bus is known as a city bus because it is a city bus. If I am in the middle of a busy street, I will want to know that bus for what it is. The bus may have no intention of making itself known to me, but it does so by its very nature as a specific material object. God too presents himself to us as he is, but unlike a material object, when he does present himself to us, he does so intentionally and in whatever mode he wishes. That is, God is in total control of what his creatures will be able to know and will know about him. He reveals. We perceive. He gives. We receive.

Looked at this way, the focus is not on the role of human experience in apprehending God, not on our grasping after the knowledge of God, not on our search for God. God is already there. The focus is on our receiving from him the gift of the knowledge of his constant, immanent presence. The Scripture gives us numerous examples of God’s revealing presence. As the opening of Hebrews summarizes, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds” (Heb 1:1-2).

The connection between one’s worldview and one’s religious experiences may well be forever lost in the mystery of transcendence itself. From our finite point of view, the infinite is impenetrable. The infinite, if it is personal, can reveal itself to us; we can never discover its character on our own. Within the Christian understanding, the pretheoretical—whether it be the categories of our thought (like
substance, being, self
) or our intuition of God—will always be beyond analysis. We may learn about the pretheoretical from Scripture, but it will be because God has revealed what he has wanted to reveal. Speculation—our only other recourse—will almost surely be misleading, as it was for Freud.

I conclude this reflection on the pretheoretical, presuppositional and intuitive, then, by observing that all three are characteristic of worldviews, they overlap and cannot always be distinguished, and they form the basis of our theoretical thought and profoundly influence our practical action.

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Rational System, Way of Life and Master Story

The Christian tradition of rationality takes as its starting point not any alleged self-evident truths. Its starting point is events in which God made himself known to men and women in particular circumstances—to Abraham and Moses, to the long succession of prophets, and to the first apostles and witnesses who saw and heard and touched the incarnate Word of God himself, Jesus of Nazareth.

Lesslie Newbigin,
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

T
his book began with a story,
a story that led to a series of questions and answers. Then the story itself largely dropped away from our attention, and we focused on the questions and their answers. In other words, the discussion so far has proceeded as if a worldview were a set of propositions or beliefs that serve as answers to a systematic set of questions. This certainly is how I understood the notion of worldview as I wrote
The Universe Next Door
. I still believe that this is a useful way to define the concept, but I have become aware that it both overemphasizes the systematic nature of worldviews and misses some other important aspects. So what is inadequate? And what is missing? Those are the subjects of this chapter.

First, to what extent is a worldview a systematic set of propositions? Second, if a worldview is the answers to a set of questions, what are the questions? Third, if it is something else or something more, what is that? Could it be a way of life, cultural liturgy or perhaps a master story into which we see our lives fitting?

A Systematic Set of Propositions

One clear expression of the notion of a worldview is Sigmund Freud’s equation of worldview with a complete, tacked-down, systematic, virtually certain philosophy of life:

On this definition, psychoanalysis is not a worldview but instead relies on the worldview of modern science, which asserts that “there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations—in other words, what we call research—and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination.”
2
Freud himself has no interest in formulating a specific worldview. He is content with what today is called
scientism
, the notion that materialistic (naturalistic) science can answer all the questions that can be answered and that these are the only questions that need to be answered.

The building of worldviews themselves, Freud says, can be “left to philosophers, who avowedly find it impossible to make their journey through life without a Baedeker [travel guide] of that kind to give them information on every subject.”
3
The irony of his readily adopting scientism as a worldview while ridiculing those who would thoughtfully examine it and all other worldviews is quite lost on him. And so, were Freud alive to see it, would the irony of the current assessment of the accuracy of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. For, as intellectual historian Peter Watson says, “Freudianism has never found unequivocal empirical support, and the very idea of a systematic unconscious, and the tripartite division of the mind into the id, ego, and superego, has seemed increasingly far-fetched. . . . [In short], the dominant intellectual presence of our century was, for the most part, wrong.”
4
Even scientism now condemns psychoanalysis.

Though there are others who think of a worldview as a complete system or a “theory of everything,”
5
this notion has not been at the center of the present book. A worldview needs to be neither conscious nor basically consistent. It need not answer every question that can be raised, only those relevant to each person’s life situation. In
The Universe Next Door
I do identify a series of somewhat consistent worldviews—Christian theism, naturalism, pantheism, for example—but these are ideal types outlined for heuristic purposes, not because anyone, including myself, holds precisely the worldview as described. Some people think that references to the Christian worldview mean that writers who speak of
the
Christian worldview are claiming there is only one way of formulating that worldview. If this were the claim being made, I too would complain. There is no
one
way of expressing any worldview. I’ve tried to give the most basic and central characteristics, but even these must not be taken as set in concrete. Everyone’s worldview is a bit different from that of everyone else; moreover, worldviews can change subtly and unconsciously over the years. Still, everyone has a worldview.

If Freud’s definition were to stand, we would have to find another term for the concept a host of worldview analysts are talking about. Nonetheless, Freud’s conception deserves mention. It illustrates an important thesis of both Naugle and the present book: the concept of worldview is worldview dependent. The worldview of scientism fits well with Freud’s conception of what a worldview is.

Still, there is some connection between Freud’s conception and the one dominating this book. Freud says, “A worldview leaves no question unanswered.” I say that every worldview will answer a few very basic questions, often with utter self-assurance, sometimes with great reticence. But what are the right questions? What are the ones a worldview must in some way address?

The Right Questions

A number of analysts define worldviews in relation to a series of questions. Sometimes these questions are given as if they were only illustrative, as if others could or should be added. In
The Universe Next Door
I tried to list most if not all of the key ones. Having seen other lists, however, I have wondered if I succeeded or if I miscast some of them.

I have listed my own questions before, but for reference, here they are again:

1. What is prime reality—the really real?
   
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
   
3. What is a human being?
   
4. What happens to persons at death?
   
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?
   
6. How do we know what is right and wrong?
   
7. What is the meaning of human history?
   

The first four questions are ontological; question 5 is epistemological; question 6 is ethical; and question 7 is a return to ontology. These questions are as broad and inclusive as I could make them at the time. They attempt to get at the foundations of all our human thoughts and actions—with one exception.

As an English literature teacher who had written his dissertation on a topic involving aesthetics, I knew from the first that I had omitted one worldview question: What is the beautiful? That is, what constitutes aesthetic value? I left the question unasked and unanswered for two reasons. First, it is almost impossible to answer simply or clearly, let alone definitively, even within an otherwise well-developed worldview. Second, for most people, aesthetics is not a conscious existential concern. People like what they like and dislike what they dislike, and that’s all there is to popular aesthetics. Moreover, in the Protestant Christian world, my own subculture, it is largely ignored except for the very small artistic community and those people with an insatiable and well-developed appreciation of the beauty of cultural objects. I am pleased to note that in the ten years separating the first and second editions of this book, Protestant Christians, especially those who self-identify as evangelicals, have grown in their interest in the arts.

But are there other questions that are missing? Could the questions be better framed? A brief survey provides more than perspective; it suggests a missing dimension.

Wilhelm Dilthey writes,

These questions are subsumed under my questions 3, 4 and 7, though they are prefaced here by a more existential tone.

Anthropologist Robert Redfield (1897–1958) defines a worldview as “the way a people characteristically look outward upon the universe.” He “articulates four sets of questions based on these ubiquitous worldview themes: What is confronted? What is the nature of the not-man? What is man called upon to do? What is the source of the orderliness of things?”
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These questions are subsumed under my questions 1, 2 and 3.

James Orr notes that two types of causes—speculative and practical—are involved in the formation of worldviews. Both “lie deep in the constitution of human nature.” On the one hand, we want a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the “origin, purpose, and destiny” of the universe and our lives. But we also want a practical understanding of these issues so that we can properly order our lives. So we ask these questions: