World view

My friend in the doctoral program wrote and said….

< <...I have been thinking about [a world view] for a while. I know that in the past, for a long time, my world view was based on my Evangelical upbringing. I am aware when that stopped working for me but since I have struggled with finding something to replace it with. How does one go about building a world view? I know for myself I have some criteria that I use to discern in some areas but is lacking in judging ideas. Talk to me some more about this....>>

My response to him was, “I suspect in a way we all have a world view, though often we are unaware of it. Most worldviews tend to be parochial and naive–and yet seem to serve most people well. But then, as Thoreau said, most people live lives of quiet desperation, and as Socrates hinted, most people live unexamined lives.

Our world view is unlikely to change unless there is a cause. Often that cause is an educational process (a good educational process–some educational processes are intended to merely reinforce belief or to supress critical thinking); or an experience that shakes our uncritical and previously unquestioned assumptions. I suspect that the educational experience most people get is not designed to challenge their world view (classical education is dead, some claim), and most of us avoid any experience that challenges our comfort zone or beliefs.

There’s nothing wrong with an evangelical worldview, per se. But I admit that often I find expressions of that stance narrow and too rigid. Most of them that I read tend toward the propositional and apologetic. I suspect that religious worldviews often are closely tied into one’s faith development (see Fowler’s Stages of Faith) and to one’s cultural context.

One way to think about the concept of worldview is from an epistemological standpoint. Meaning, it is a way we answer fundamental questions about what is Truth, what is true, and how do we know? World views also give us perspective–but an informed world view has the capacity to address its own egocentrism and address its own prejudices. A world view also informs our onotology: what is the purpose of life, and our axiology: what is right? what is moral?

I just had a conversation yesterday with my college son, whose academic college education in the sciences and technology leaves much to be desired by way of exposure to the classics. He parroted the notions of the current anthropological concept of “cultural equivalence”, which says (sort of) that in terms of cultures, one is no better than the other, they are “just different.” As an exercise I took debate with him on that popular notion, saying that some cultures indeed ARE better than others. I did that being aware that he probably is being inculcated with a relativist worldview in his college experience. Like most persons his age, he is able to tell you WHAT he (thinks) he belives, but not WHY.

A world view helps us know WHY we believe what we do.