What is a Worldview?
Anyone raised in a conservative Evangelical church in the previous generation will know worldview as a household word. One may also have found the term used on the nightly news in the context of America’s various foreign entanglements. Such talking heads will have used “worldview” in the same way that an anthropologist will use the word “culture” or simply as a synonym for a religion with which the viewers are demanded to have new sympathies. We begin to have a sense that there is a lack of agreement on the meaning.
William Halverson defined a worldview as “a comprehensive view of reality in terms of which one attempts to understand and ‘place’ everything that comes before one’s consciousness.”1 The loaded words here are “comprehensive” and “everything,” both of which have the potential to create the same misunderstanding.
Worldviews are not literally everything in one’s view. Mundane items such as that uneven paint spot on the wall, the item still waiting on the to-do list, and one’s favorite song or knowledge of how to change a tire—these, we understand, do not make the cut.
More properly a worldview is a general system made up of truth claims and it always has a kind of hierarchy; in other words, some of those truth claims regard that ultimate basic belief or presupposition level and others non-basic or some of the main consequential truths.
James Sire, at least in his earlier work, simplified the concept by saying the whole framework of worldview is “a set of presuppositions.”2 Hold that thought.
Ronald Nash gave what is perhaps the most useful definition for our purposes, because it represents the widely accepted way that the term was used over the past few generations. He said,
“In its simplest terms, a worldview is a set of beliefs about the most important issues in life … It is a conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously place or fit everything we believe and by which we interpret and judge reality.”3
If it is true that everyone has a worldview of sorts, and if it is also true that most people do not think critically about what must be ultimate in any worldview, then it would stand to reason that worldviews will differ in scope. In other words, it must be the case that some worldviews will be bigger than others. Some will be defined by their answer to the question: Is there a God? If there is, what is His relation to the world? Others will settle for where they think history is going—and more often than not, this will be defined either by one’s political attachments, or perhaps some optimism about scientific or technological advance.
A Worldview Taxonomy
Understanding that there are different kinds of worldviews and how to classify them is more illuminating than is often realized. I have sought to divide these kinds in the following way:
(i.) Worldviews as Metaphysics.
(ii.) Worldviews as Religions.
(iii.) Worldviews as Philosophies.
(iv.) Worldviews as Epochs.
(v.) Worldviews as Ideologies.
Of the metaphysical kind, we might further divide such worldviews into those of quantity and quality. In other words, the focus of the first kind answers the question, How many? while the second kind answers the question, What kind?
Quantity-metaphysic worldviews include monism, dualism, and pluralism. These views are exactly what their names suggest. Monism holds that all is one, dualism that there are two ultimate realities (or beings or principles), and pluralism that there are a plurality.
Quality-metaphysic worldviews include materialism (or naturalism) and immaterialism (or supernaturalism). Materialism is the belief that the material universe is all there is. Naturalism is a synonym, as it holds that nature is all there is.
Among the religious worldviews, we must first understand that any belief in one “god” (monotheism) or many “gods” (polytheism) is a brand of theism, from the Greek word for “god” (theos). Here we also find pantheism is the belief that all is “god,” once again placing the word “god” in quotes and in the lowercase; whereas panentheism is the belief that this “god” is in the world in some way. Unlike pantheism, this assumes that the god is finite. Pantheism is monistic. Within this the Eastern framework of pantheism emerged first Hinduism and then Buddhism. There is also deism which was the religion of fashion during the rise of the Enlightenment.
Philosophical ideas can become worldviews when they take unto themselves a distinct way of viewing ultimate being (metaphysics), how we know (epistemology), and how we should live (ethics). Such philosophies have included Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicurianism, Stoicism, rationalism, empiricism, romanticism, idealism, pragmatism, nihilism, and existentialism.
What do I mean by worldviews as epochs? It is simply that there has been a basic way of looking at the world that underwent a great change from one time period to the next. Here we have a very simple four-part narrative: ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern. Of course the real distinction between modernism and postmodernism has been hotly debated ever since the idea of “postmodernism” burst onto the scene. But these four terms will suffice.
The last category belongs to ideology as worldview. The word “ideology” is not a strict synonym of philosophy. An ideology is a distinctly secular and political phenomena. It is both descriptive and normative—not only explaining everything in terms of some political stance, but demanding the submission of all else to its advancement, or its resistance to an advancing phenomenon. In this class we find liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, anarchism, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, and fascism. One might also place individualism and collectivism here as two poles on the spectrum of the reduction of human experience. Russell Kirk wrote of this.
“By definition, ‘ideology’ means servitude to political dogmas, abstract ideas not founded upon human experience. Ideology is inverted religion, and the ideologue is the sort of person whom the historian Jacob Burckhardt called the ‘terrible simplifier.’”4
Needless to say, there is overlap in this category as much as in the others.
Worldview Minimalism and Maximalism
The key to how worldviews function is to understand what presuppositions are, how they are challenged, and how they relate to more subordinate worldview pieces. A presupposition is like an assumption, or a premise to an argument. However, it is not any old premise. It is fundamental to the whole of one’s worldview. For the Christian, the triune God of Scripture is such a presupposition. So is the authority of the Bible. So is the immateriality of the soul, and the sinfulness of man given the fall of Adam. So is both the deity and the humanity of Christ.
These are different sorts of presuppositions. But they function as “givens” in relation to other beliefs that either follow logically, or are discovered by revelation. That is their status as presuppositions. That is what makes them so. They are more foundational than others, so much so, that they are most foundational.
I would consider myself a worldview maximalist because I see presuppositions existing within a worldview, as a set of basic beliefs, the non-basic beliefs also existing within that same worldview. In other words, it is not that the worldview is the subjective lens through which one begins interpreting the non-worldview. Rather, one sees an objective relationship between the basic and non-basic elements of the worldview.
For Sire, a worldview is “the elephant” in the story of a father’s explanation to his young son. The question is: What is holding up the world? This elephant holds up all the other animals that hold up the world. The previous answers about a camel and a kangaroo eventually wore off for the curious boy, but then when he asked, “But what holds up the elephant?” the father found his stop-gap: It’s elephant all the way down.
As the son grows, he will discover two different sorts of people putting an “elephant” in that place. For the naturalist, it is the universe itself; for the theist, it is God. Beyond that, there are no further answers.
The elephant stands for the worldview, and therefore is “pre-theoretical” or entirely presuppositional. It is at “the base of all our thought.”5 In other words, for Sire, worldviews are just the “set” of, or sum total of, all such presuppositions. I would call this view worldview minimalist.
I do not accept this view.
Classical philosophy and theology operated as if the metaphysical questions could be established by rationally demonstrative arguments.
This implies that we are not stuck in our own personal worldview bubbles, where we cannot appeal to concepts outside of all finite bubbles in order to show others (into their own bubbles) that some bubbles conforms more to the reality of things than other bubbles, the reality that is independent of all our little “thought bubbles.”
It may seem ironic, but a minimalist worldview concept winds up making the world that follows these presuppositions a determined affair. It is very difficult to get talked out of such presuppositions if they are pre-theoretical. To be pre-theoretical, to be beyond any more answers, is to put an end to persuasion. So at one extreme, worldviews are seen to be a mental world where one projects what the world is like, from basic commitments that are as personal (not rationally constructed) as they are overdetermined (not amendable by external persuasion).
However, the opposite extreme is that they are underdetermined. In other words, that the order in which the ideas exist in each mind exert no weight on others. We can mix and match to our hearts content at the all-you-can-eat worldview buffet table. It is very fashionable for people to think of themselves as “free thinkers,” able to make their own way through the maze of ideas.
The notion that a worldview begins to accumulate in all of us from childhood, and that the weight of our ultimate presuppositions begins subordinating all other matters that are perceived as contingent by comparison—this can seem beyond our control. Since we can seem to choose our own views as surely as we choose our own food, clothing, acquaintances, and entertainment, we tend to downplay the pervasiveness of those presuppositions.
Adding to such opinions is some amount of real asymmetry. It is not too uncommon to discover all sorts of people who are, so to speak, “all over the map” when it comes to their worldview combinations. This is not only because of some stubbornness in the person, but there are objective ways in which different worldviews lend themselves to diverse implications and may even flow from otherwise contradictory fountainheads.
In fact, there will be overlap so that one worldview can be pantheistic and mystical, while another can be pantheistic and rationalist. Two different people can begin with the same metaphysical outlook and yet have vastly different views of politics, while others can differ greatly on ultimate questions of origin and come to the same place about politics. All of this is deceptive. It can give the impression that where one starts has no real bearing on where one winds up. This is quite false.
What one believes about whether the First Cause is personal will have massive implications on the place of personal value in one’s scientific, not to speak of one’s ethical, outlook. Likewise, if one is bombarded with talk of “Science” as if it were an exalted class of superhuman minds, and “scientific consensus” as a fixed orthodoxy produced by the same, then any challenge to this or that theory, or experiment, or finding, or study, will be easily dismissed as superstition.
In other words, the power of presuppositions operating in one’s worldview is not exactly the same thing as the force of one’s upbringing or peer pressure or an ulterior motive for rejecting new information. Here we are talking about a relationship between logical necessities and psychological tendencies. One may of course be completely wrong in his application of logic. The only point is that what one is convinced of regarding the more fundamental aspects of reality will shape both the answers and even the questions that follow regarding aspects seen to be dependent.
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1. William H. Halverson, A Concise Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1976), 452.
2. James Sire, The Universe Next Door (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 16.
3. Ronald Nash, Worldviews in Conflict (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 16.
4. Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (Washington D.C. Regnery, 1991), 9.
5. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 19.
