Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (19 page)

Despite the anguish that might well accompany this question as it is batted around by the mind, the answer, I think, is clear. As Karl Barth once said in rejecting natural theology, “Nein!” No, it is not necessary to abandon the notion that we can know something about what really is.

If we begin our intellectual quest demanding the kind of certainty Descartes sought, if we assume that the first issue to resolve is how I can know anything at all, we will, I believe, eventually be led either to nihilism or to utter relativism (also a form of nihilism).
15

Nor will we get any help from the sociology of knowledge as conceived by Berger and Luckmann. Such a sociology is not equipped to answer epistemological questions. It is an empirical science that observes the phenomena of knowledge, not the objects of knowledge. Its own “object of knowledge” is knowledge as such. In an appendix to
The Sacred Canopy
Berger makes this clear:

If Berger is correct, what is to be learned about what Berger calls “worlds” and I call “worldviews” is limited. We can draw no conclusions whatsoever about whether any worldview represents the truth about what is really there. Ontological questions cannot be answered. Neither can epistemological questions.

All we can learn is how worldviews in their public and private dimensions function in relation to social context. This is not everything we would like to know, but it is not nothing. It gives us a keen insight into the subjective and social aspect of worldviews.
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There is, however, another way to look at the possibility of objective knowledge. We do not need to begin our intellectual journey with the question of how we know. If we begin instead with what is there, there is a way to justify holding that our worldviews have both a subjective and an objective dimension. If the really real is the biblical God, it is possible that at least some of what we think we know is actually, objectively true. I have tried to explain how this is so in chapter two of
The Universe Next Door
. Basically the argument is this: If God, the all-knowing knower of all things, made us in his image, we can be the sometimes-knowing knowers of some things. Even though we are alienated from our Maker, he has never left us without some capacity to know, and he has graciously redeemed us and is transforming us so that now, though we “see through a glass darkly,” we will one day see him face to face.
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Of course such a set of presuppositions are not self-evidently true, but if they are true, then objective knowledge is possible. When an ontology focused on the nature of God (and the nature of humanity as created in his image) precedes epistemology, intellectual justification of such an ontology is possible.
20
Alvin Plantinga, for example, explains how belief in God can have “three varieties of positive epistemic status”: justification, rationality and warrant. If it is in fact the case that human beings are all endowed with a
sensus divinitatis
that allows them to directly sense the existence of God, then no other justification for their belief is necessary. One’s belief in God is, as Plantinga puts it, properly basic. The fact of God’s existence (ontology) and the fact of the
sensus divinitatis
(ontology) precede and undergird the objective knowledge (epistemology) of the theistic God, a “God Who Is There,” as Francis Schaeffer puts it.
21
Plantinga goes on to explain how such epistemic status applies to the whole range of the biblical worldview.
22

Traditional Christians in general are not about to give up the idea of objective truth. I do not think I speak only for myself when I say that every fiber of my being cries out for a worldview that is not just my own story, my own set of propositions, my own interpretation of life, but one that is universally, objectively true, one in which the really real is the God Who Is There, and in which human beings are truly made in his image and capable of knowing at least some of “the way things actually are.” The Bible assumes that this sort of knowledge is possible and that it is the major vehicle by which we can know what is the case, not just about the world but about this God Who Is There.

“All men by nature desire to know,” said Aristotle. Yes, and in a postmodern world we have to add, All of us desire to know the truth, not just a story constructed by ourselves—each of us as individuals, some of us as communities or all of us as human beings. And there is at least one worldview that shows how that is possible, one that can be as intimate for each of us as it can be universal with all of us. We find this worldview laid out in more detail than any of us can comprehend in the Bible. It is indeed a deeply satisfying worldview that is both public and private, both subjective and objective.

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Worldview

A Refined Definition

When we accept a certain set of pre-suppositions and use them as our interpretative framework, we may be said to dwell in them as we do in our own body.

Michael Polanyi,
Personal Knowledge

I
t is time to draw together
the threads of this argument into a final definition of
worldview
. This will not be a definition that tries to incorporate all the characteristics of all worldview definitions. That is impossible, for the very concept of worldview is itself worldview dependent. Modern optimistic naturalists, scientists especially, think of worldviews as self-evident assumptions that allow almost certain knowledge of material reality. Post-Kantian idealists think of worldviews as innate mental structures through which we order and understand the phenomena of our lives. Postmodernists are likely to see worldviews as linguistic structures by which we construct our world and come to control it. Likewise, a Christian definition of
worldview
will depend on its prior commitment to the objective reality of the infinite-personal God who has created an intelligible cosmos.

But this perspectival nature of worldviews does not commit Christians to relativism. Pluralism—the side-by-side existence of worldviews that are at least partially contradictory—is not relativism. Truth as classically understood among the Hebrews as well as the Greeks, the ancients as well as the moderns, is not relative. Truth as
the way things are
or the accurate representation in language of
the way things are
precludes relativism. The question is not whether there
is
a way things are. That insight is pretheoretical. The question is what Descartes meant when he considered truth to be one of the categories. Truth, as “the conformity of thought with its object,” he said, “seems to be a notion so transcendentally clear that no one could be ignorant of it.”
1
Alvin Plantinga notes, “Thomas Reid and others point out that the idea of
truth
, as a relation between beliefs and the world, is part of our native noetic equipment.”
2

My definition of
worldview
, therefore, will necessarily assume that we hold our worldview to be the truth of the matter. If that is so, then the alternative definitions will be false in whatever way they contradict our own when our own is actually true. Of course, we could be wrong or partially wrong. But in a world where there is order, where chaos is not universal, where things are not “every which way,” there is indeed a
way things are
.

Still, the history of worldview teaches us a great deal about the character of worldviews. My own refined definition of
worldview
owes much to that history, as I will point out in what follows.

Worldview: A Refined Definition, Part 1

The refined definition of
worldview
has two parts—a basic ontological definition and a list of questions that generate the presuppositions that characterize any specific worldview.

This succinct definition needs to be unpacked. Each phrase represents a specific characteristic that deserves more elaborate comment.

Worldview as commitment.
Selecting this phrase—“a worldview is a commitment”—has for me been the hardest part of refining the concept. The primary reason for this is that it makes an ontological claim. That is, it tries to identify precisely what a worldview is. To see the significance of this claim that a worldview is a commitment, notice what is not claimed.

First, a worldview is not fundamentally a set of propositions or a web of beliefs. That is, it is not first and foremost a matter of the intellect. Nor is it fundamentally a matter of language or a semiotic system of narrative signs. The intellect is surely involved, and language is present as a tool of the intellect, but the essence of a worldview lies deep in the inner recesses of the human self. It is a matter of the soul and is represented more as a spiritual orientation, or perhaps disposition, than as a matter of mind alone.

It is not the biblical God alone, however, who can be seen as one’s rock and salvation. For William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), it was his autonomous human self. In “Invictus,” a poem read by schoolchildren to illustrate, if not teach, self-reliance, Henley declares in ringing words,

These sorts of affirmations represent profound dispositions or commitments of the central core of the whole person.

Second, a worldview is a commitment but not one that is necessarily the result of a conscious decision. We are committed when we act toward an end even when we are unaware of our motives or the goals toward which our actions tend. Worldviews are a matter of the heart.

Third, a worldview is not fundamentally a
habitus,
a pattern of behavior; it is the motive behind that pattern. Nor is it a cultural liturgy; it is the underlying prerational impulse of those who engage in the cultural liturgies we perform as participants in a culture.

Worldview as a fundamental orientation of the heart.
This notion would be easier to grasp if the word
heart
bore in today’s world the weight it bears in Scripture. As David Naugle has so well pointed out, the biblical concept of the heart is far richer than our common parlance would have it. Today we think of the heart as the seat of the emotions (especially tender, sympathetic emotions) and perhaps the will. But it rarely includes the mind. The biblical concept, however, includes the notions of wisdom (Prov 2:10), emotion (Ex 4:14; Jn 14:1), desire and will (1 Chron 29:18), spirituality (Acts 8:21), and intellect (Rom 1:21).
3
In short, and in biblical terms, the heart is “the central defining element of the human person.”
4
That is, a worldview is situated in the self—the central operating chamber of every human being. It is from this heart that all one’s thoughts and actions proceed.

The phrase “fundamental orientation” likewise bears unpacking. At its root a worldview is pretheoretical, below the conscious mind. It directs the conscious mind from a region not normally accessed by the conscious mind. It is not that the conscious mind cannot think about a worldview and its pretheoretical character. Presumably we are doing that now. It is that normally we do not do this. Rather we think
with
our worldview and
because of
our worldview, not
about
our worldview. People who go through a crisis of belief or have a peculiar bent for philosophic thinking may think about their worldview much of the time. Others, however, may never even become aware of their own worldview, let alone ponder it.