Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (28 page)

9
Psychiatrist Armand Nicholi Jr. says, “Evidence exists that the human brain is ‘hardwired’ (genetically programmed) for belief” (
The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life
[New York: Free Press, 2002], p. 46).

10
See “category” in
The
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 108. Pascal lists space, time, motion and number (Blaise Pascal,
Pensées
, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1966), no. 110, p. 58; Arthur F. Holmes considers the pretheoretical categories in
Contours of a Christian Worldview
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 48; and Everett W. Hall examines the truth value implicit in the categories themselves (
Philosophical Systems: A Categorical Analysis
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], esp. pp. 1-6, 22-25).

11
“[Truth] seems to be a notion so transcendentally clear that no one could be ignorant of it. . . . There is no way to learn what truth is, if one does not know it by nature. . . . Of course, it is possible to tell the meaning of the word to someone who does not know the language, and tell him that the word truth, in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object. . . . But we can give no definition of logic which will help anyone discover its nature” (Descartes in a letter to Marin Mersene in 1639, quoted by Stephen Gaukroger,
Descartes: An Intellectual Biography
[Oxford: Clarendon, 1995], p. 327). Descartes is stating what is called the “truth of correspondence.” Scholastic philosopher Étienne Gilson further clarifies the concept this way: “To say what is true is to say what is, and to attribute to each thing the very being that it marks. Thus it is the being of a thing which founds its truth; and it is the truth of a thing which underlies the truth of thought” (
A Gilson Reader: Selected Writings of Étienne Gilson
[Garden City, NY: Image, 1957], p. 247). It is unlikely that any other theories of truth—coherence or pragmatic, for example—could be pretheoretical. That very fact may well indicate a certain inadequacy if and when these theories replace the truth of correspondence as the reigning concept.

12
Michael Kearney, quoted in Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 242.

13
Robert Redfield, quoted in ibid., p. 246.

14
Sigmund Freud,
The Future of an Illusion
, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), pp. 30-33—but the entire book is devoted to this issue. See also Nicholi,
Question of God
, pp. 36-56.

15
Freud,
Future of an Illusion
, p. 30.

16
Ibid., p. 47.

17
Thomas Aquinas, “Whether the Existence of God Is Self-Evident: Reply to Objection I,” in
Summa Theologica
, 2nd and rev. ed., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (online ed., 2003),
www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm
.

18
John Calvin,
Institutes of the Christian Religion
, trans. Henry Beveridge (London: James Clarke, 1957), p. 43 (1.3.1).

19
Alvin Plantinga,
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 173.

20
Ibid.

21
Following Calvin’s lead, it would be easy to see why Descartes thought that his idea of God was something he simply found himself to have and that it must have come from God. Descartes, of course, considered his innate idea to be so clear and distinct and of such a transcendent nature that he couldn’t have produced it himself. Calvin is content to observe its origin without making from it a philosophical proof for God’s existence, something he would have considered unnecessary (you don’t need an argument for the existence of someone whom you know directly). Calvin is more interested in the fact that it leaves human beings with no excuse for their failure to live up to God’s requirements.

22
Blaise Pascal,
Pensées
, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), no. 423, p. 154. Also see no. 110, p. 58.

23
Freud,
Future of an Illusion
, p. 31.

24
By “radical fideists” I mean those who believe that there is no rational way to justify one’s beliefs; they are primitive and unanalyzable. As one student in Denmark once asked me, “Isn’t faith more faith when it can give no reason for what it affirms?” He said he got this idea from Kierkegaard, but I suspect this is a misreading.

25
Nicholi makes such a case against Freud (
Question of God
, pp. 36-56). Christian arguments for the existence of God have a very long history. See, for example, Étienne Gilson,
God and Philosophy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941); E. L. Mascall,
He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism
(London: Libra, 1966); J. P. Moreland,
Scaling the Secular City
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987); Richard Swinburne,
The Existence of God
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Peter Kreeft and Ron Tacelli, “Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God,” in
Handbook of Christian Apologetics
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), pp. 47-88; Steven T. Davis,
God, Reason and Theistic Proofs
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); and J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig,
Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), pp. 463-500.

26
This definition is based on the first two propositions of Christian theism in James W. Sire,
The Universe Next Door
, 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), pp. 23-24.

27
Martin Heidegger’s massive
Being and Time
is an attempt to elucidate the concept of being, which, he says, has not been done since the pre-Socratic philosophers.

28
Thomas Aquinas and his neoscholastic interpreters, notably Étienne Gilson and E. L. Mascal, would argue that by the light of natural reason it can be shown that God as supreme Being (as the really real) must necessarily exist and that he must have a number of attributes that carry theoretical content. Noting that science cannot answer why there is something rather than nothing, Gilson says that scholastic philosophy can: “To this supreme question, the only conceivable answer is that each and every particular energy, each and every particular existing thing, depends for its existence upon a pure Act of existence. In order to be the ultimate answer to all existential problems, this supreme cause has to be absolute existence. Being absolute, such a cause is self-sufficient; if it creates, its creative act must be free. Since it creates not only being but order, it must be something which at least contains the principle of order known to us in experience, namely, thought. Now an absolute, self-subsisting, and knowing cause is not an It but a He. In short, the first cause [what I have called the really real] is the One in whom the cause of both nature and history coincide, a philosophical God who can also be the God of a religion” (
God and Philosophy
, pp. 139-41). Beyond this, Gilson refuses to go, arguing that for much of our Christian concept of God revelation is necessary. Though Mascall would not say that the notion of God as the “I
am
” is a pretheoretical notion, he does believe that this “metaphysic of Exodus” includes by implication a host of characteristics other than simple existence as such: “It draws into unity all the other attributes and operations of God: simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, immutability, eternity, unity, his character as Prime Mover, as Uncaused Cause, as Sufficient Reason, as Perfect Pattern and as Final End of all things” (
He Who Is
, p. 13). I highly recommend David Bentley Hart’s recent profound reflections on the nature and character of God as understood by Christian and other religious traditions. See his
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

29
Lesslie Newbigin,
Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

30
It is not clear whether this analogy derives from Kearney or Naugle (Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 243).

31
Ibid., pp. 25-29.

32
Herman Dooyeweerd,
A New Critique of Theoretical Thought
, trans. David H. Freeman and William S. Young (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), 1:128.

33
See Jacob Klapwijk, “On Worldviews and Philosophy,” in
Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science
, ed. Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen and Richard J. Mouw (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), pp. 46-48, 50-52.

Chapter 5: Rational System, Way of Life and Master Story

1
Sigmund Freud, “The Question of a
Weltanschauung
,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 22:158.

2
Ibid., p. 159.

3
Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” in
The Standard Edition
, 20:96.

4
Peter Watson,
The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century
(New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 759-60.

5
Philosopher Theodore Plantinga insists on using the term
worldview
to mean a “theory of everything.” So his critique and ultimate rejection of worldview for Christian analysis is not of much value in assessing its actual usefulness when defined as something much less than a “theory of everything.” Any given person’s worldview need not address all possible issues, only those relevant to his or her personal life situation. The more general, abstract worldview need only provide enough general conceptions to allow extrapolations to be made in areas that may later emerge historically. The Christian worldview in the sixteenth century did not have or need an explicit way of dealing with nuclear war or human cloning. But it already had the basic foundation for dealing with such issues. Moreover, Plantinga’s implicit notion that a worldview must be unified and consistent keeps him from seeing that while a single person has only one worldview, it might look to an outsider as if he had more than one because he does not seem to act or speak from a single point of view. Plantinga likewise makes too much of the
view
part of
worldview
, seeing the notion as visual and not paying enough attention to what people who use the term say they mean by it. His objection to those who talk of “a Christian worldview” as opposed to “the Christian worldview” is moot, if one uses the term to mean something other than a complete, final and true theory of everything. See “David Naugle and the Quest for a Theory of Everything,”
Myodicy
, no. 17, December 2002,
www.plantinga.ca/m/MCD.HTM
.

6
Wilhelm Dilthey,
Gesammelte Schriften
, 8:99, quoted in David Naugle,
Worldview: The History of a Concept
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 83.

7
Robert Redfield,
The Primitive Worldview and Its Transformation
, p. 85, quoted in Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 245.

8
James Orr,
The Christian View of God and the World
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), p. 7. Orr quotes as well from Thomas H. Huxley,
Man’s Place in Nature
: “The question of questions for mankind, the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other, is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature, and of his relation to the universe of things. Whence our race has come, what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature’s power over us? to what goal we are tending? are the problems which present themselves anew, and with undiminished interest, to every man born in the world?” (p. 7n).

9
Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton,
The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984), p. 35. Almost identical to Walsh and Middleton’s questions are those of David Dockery: “Where did we come from? Who are we? What has gone wrong with the world? What solution can be offered to fix it?” (David Dockery, “Shaping a Christian Worldview,” in
Shaping a Christian Worldview,
ed. David Dockery [Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2002], p. 3). Likewise Charles Colson echoes Walsh and Middleton with, “Where did we come from and who are we (
creation
)? What has gone wrong with the world (
fall
)? And what can we do to fix it (
redemption
)?” (Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey,
How Now Shall We Live?
[Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1999], p. 14).

10
Charles Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23.

11
James K. A. Smith,
Imagining the Kingdom
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), throughout.

12
Dilthey, quoted by Naugle,
Worldview
, pp. 82-83. Emphasis added.

13
Ibid., p. 86.

14
Abraham Kuyper,
Lectures on Calvinism
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1931), p. 11.

15
Walsh and Middleton,
Transforming Vision
, p. 17.

16
Ibid., p. 31. The positive and practical implications of living out one’s worldview are brilliantly explained and illustrated in Steve Garber,
The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and
Behavior During the University Years
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), esp. pp. 108-24.

17
Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries
, p. 10.

18
Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh,
Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), p. 11.

19
Ibid., p. 56.

20
For a seminal work in noting the link between narrative style and worldview content, see Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
(Garden City, NJ: Doubleday/Anchor, 1953), pp. 1-20.