What is a Worldview?
by Ronald H. Nash
Worldview thinking has become an important tool to help Christians understand, explain, and defend the Christian faith. Every human being has a worldview, even though many are uninformed about what a worldview is and the power that worldviews have over the way we think and behave. A worldview is the total of answers people give to the most important questions in life. According to some, the five most important elements in any worldview are what people believe about God, ultimate reality, knowledge, ethics, and human nature.
Worldview thinking has important links to religious belief. Instead of viewing Christianity as a collection of theological bits and pieces to be believed or debated, people should approach it as a conceptual system, as a total world-and-life view. Once people understand that Christianity and its competitors are worldviews, they will be in a better position to judge the relative merits of the competing systems.
The case for or against Christian theism, then, should be made and evaluated in terms of total systems. Some people reject Christianity not because of their problems with one or two isolated issues, such as the virgin birth, but because their worldview encompasses beliefs that are the opposite of Christian thinking. Opponents of the Christian worldview disagree with Christianity because they hold to competing worldviews.
People can and do change their worldviews. Saul of Tarsus was one of early Christianity's greatest enemies. He was fanatically committed to a system that seemed to rule out any possibility of his change or conversion to the Christian faith. Saul's conversion encourages us with the confidence that even those with the most opposing worldviews to Christianity may be capable of total change. People who used to be humanists, naturalists, atheists, or followers of competing religious faiths have found reasons to turn away from their former worldviews and embrace Christianity. Conversely, people who used to profess allegiance to Christianity sometimes reach a point where they feel they can no longer believe.
It seems unlikely that a single set of conditions will always be present when people change a worldview. After all, many people remain unaware that they have a worldview, even though the sudden change in their lives and thoughts resulted from their exchanging one worldview for another. In many cases the actual change is triggered by a significant event, often a crisis of some kind. But in other instances an event or piece of new information led them to think in ways that were totally different for them. Quite unexpectedly, these people saw things they had overlooked before, or they suddenly saw matters fit together in a pattern that brought meaning where none had been discernible before.
People change their minds on important subjects for a bewildering variety of reasons (or for no reason at all). When faced with a choice among competing worldviews, we should choose the one that, when applied to the whole of reality, gives us the most coherent picture of the world. And that most coherent worldview is the Christian worldview. Helping people see the importance of their worldview and leading them to realize the coherence in the Christian worldview is one of the most important tasks of apologetics.
Is Logic Arbitrary?
by David K. Clark
Logic involves principles that govern how humans should think and speak. Studying logic means investigating correct reasoning. Traditionally, logic is said to begin with three basic laws: identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle. According to the law of identity, if a statement is true, then it's true. Noncontradiction says that if a statement is true, then it can't be false. The excluded middle asserts that a statement is either true or false. Logic includes such laws, but there is more to it as well.
People observe various kinds of laws—moral, natural, mathematical, legal, and logical laws. Some laws declare what ought to be. Moral and legal laws say what a person should do, although it is possible to violate them. (For instance, people should tell the truth but often don't.) Other laws describe what actually is. Natural laws assert what does happen under certain natural conditions. Theoretically, natural laws are consistent and reliable (although it's possible for a stronger opposite force to overcome a weaker force as in a tug-of-war.)
Logic has an ought component. This makes logic somewhat like math. If a shopkeeper wants to make a profit and regularly gives $50 in change to customers who pay with $20 bills, she violates logic. But this isn't a moral transgression; it's a logical blunder. She's not acting immorally but irrationally. It's wise to think logically.
What is the ground or foundation of logic? Human logic is patterned after reality. The Creator built logic into the structures of the physical and spiritual worlds. The principles of logic reflect a deep reasonableness that characterizes both God and God's creation. Because the logic of human thought and speech is grounded in God and God's work, logic is not arbitrary.
People suggest in several ways that logic is arbitrary. Some say logic isn't a discovery of the human mind detected in reality but an invention of the human mind imposed on reality. They claim that logic is arbitrary because it's grounded in how humans choose to think.
This position yields a problematic consequence: it disconnects human thought from reality. It implies that human interaction with the real world fundamentally distorts that world. The human mind recalibrates the input of the real world to fit its own inward configuration. So there's no telling whether human thinking has any connection with reality. That is troubling, for life and action require knowledge of the real world. (In addition, someone stating this position is likely refuting himself. He is probably saying that the truth about the real world is that human thinking is imposed on reality.)
Others say that logic is grounded in culture, not in objective reality. Different cultures have different logics. For example, people commonly say logic is a Western invention that Asians successfully ignore. Logic is arbitrary because it's rooted in random cultural habits.
This is a misunderstanding. While people of various cultures may think about different content and begin at varied starting points, the deep reasonableness that governs human thinking is the same. Consider an analogy. An African tribesman counts lions. An Eskimo with no knowledge of lions counts seals. Both count according to mathematical principles. Similarly, the content of thought obviously differs from place to place, but the underlying reasonableness built into the creation will govern human thought regardless of culture.
How Should a Christian Relate to a Scientific Naturalist?
by J. P. Moreland
"I'm too scientific for religious superstition. Science is the only way of gaining knowledge of reality, and it tells us the physical world is all there is." This claim, espoused by scientific naturalists, is called scientism, the view that science is the paradigm of truth and rationality.
There are two forms of scientism: strong and weak. Strong scientism implies that something is true if and only if it is a scientific claim that has been successfully tested and used according to appropriate scientific methodology. Within this view there are no truths apart from scientific truths, and even if there were, there would be no reason to believe them.
Weak scientism allows for truths to exist apart from science and grants them some minimal rational status without scientific support. Still, weak scientism implies that science is the most authoritative sector of human learning.
If either form is true, drastic implications result for theology. If strong scientism is true, then theology is not a cognitive enterprise at all and there is no such thing as theological knowledge. If weak scientism is true, then the conversation between theology and science will be a monologue, with theology listening to science and waiting for its support.
What, then, should we say about scientism, and what should Christians say to those who hold this belief?
Note first that strong scientism is self-refuting. Strong scientism is not itself a proposition of science but a proposition of philosophy about science to the effect that only scientific propositions are true and/or rational. And strong scientism is itself offered as a true, rationally justified position. Propositions that are self-refuting do not just happen to be false; they are necessarily false—it is not possible for them to be true. No future progress will have the slightest effect on making strong scientism more acceptable.
Two more problems count equally against strong and weak scientism. First, scientism does not adequately allow for the task of stating and defending the necessary presuppositions for science itself to be practiced. Thus scientism shows itself to be a foe and not a friend of science. Science cannot be practiced in thin air. Scientism has many assumptions, each has been challenged, and the task of stating and defending these assumptions is a philosophical one. The conclusions of science cannot be more certain than the presuppositions it rests upon and uses to reach those conclusions.
Strong scientism rules out these presuppositions altogether because neither the presuppositions themselves nor their defense are scientific matters. Weak scientism misconstrues its strength because it believes that scientific propositions have greater intellectual authority than those of other fields, such as philosophy. This would mean that the conclusions of science are more certain than the philosophical presuppositions used to justify and reach those conclusions, and that is absurd.
Here are some of the philosophical presuppositions of science:
• the existence of a theory of an independent, external world
• the orderly nature of the external world
• the knowability of the external world
• the existence of truth
• the existence of the laws of logic
• the reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers and as a source of justified beliefs in our intellectual environment
• the adequacy of language to describe the world
• the existence of values used in science (e.g., "Test theories fairly and report test results honestly")
Second, there are true, rational beliefs in fields outside science. Strong scientism does not allow for this fact, and it is therefore to be rejected as an account of our intellectual enterprise.
Moreover, some claims outside science (for instance, "Torturing babies is wrong" or "I am now thinking about science") are better justified than some believed within science (for example, "Evolution takes place through a series of very small steps"). It is not hard to believe that many of our currently held scientific beliefs will and should be revised or abandoned in a hundred years, but it would be hard to see how the same could be said of the nonscientific propositions just cited. Weak scientism does not account for this fact.
In sum, scientism in both forms is inadequate, and it is important for Christians to integrate science and theology with genuine respect for both.
Notable Christian Apologist: Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), one of the most influential thinkers of all time, was a medieval theologian, philosopher, professor, priest, poet, adviser to popes and kings—and apologist. Because he is considered a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, his influence has at times been largely limited to Catholic circles. In recent decades, however, there has been a revival of interest in Aquinas's thoughts, among Protestant philosophers and apologists as well as among secular thinkers.
Some theologians have criticized Aquinas for dividing faith and reason and thus unwittingly planting the seeds of modern religious irrationalism. Yet most Aquinas scholars see this as a misunderstanding of his thought, which actually emphasizes the opposite—the unity of truth, knowledge, faith, and reason. Apologists can learn much from Aquinas in both attitude and approach.
Aquinas wrote over 100 titles on a wide variety of subjects. Only a few were specifically apologetic works, the best known being Summa Contra Gentiles, which was written to equip Christian missionaries evangelizing Muslims. However, all that Aquinas wrote was broadly apologetic. His vision was to think out a fully Christian worldview, in all of its aspects, and to articulate and defend it rationally against alternative views.
In his writing Aquinas considered some 10,000 objections against his own positions. He knew what others believed and why they believed it, especially the most influential views of his day. He treated these other positions accurately and fairly, and he responded with gracious but rigorous reasoning and argument. Above all he was interested in truth. (In this regard he appealed to Pr 27:17, saying that "iron sharpens iron.") He had no room for apologetic arguments that used cheap shots, caricatures, or shoddy reasoning, which are unfair and unloving to people and do not serve the truth.
Some of Aquinas's opponents appeared to hold to a two-truth view, believing in truth arrived at by philosophical reasoning and religious truth arrived at by faith. To them, these truths were independent and could be incompatible with each other. Aquinas passionately opposed this wedge between faith and reason as being incoherent, destructive, and unbiblical. Since God is the Creator of all that exists apart from Himself, all truth—however and wherever it is discovered—is from God. It is unified and consistent and ultimately points back to God Himself. Aquinas was ready to accept genuine truths discovered by non-Christian (Jewish, Muslim, pagan Greek) thinkers, and he sought to show them to be ultimately rooted in and best explained within a Christian worldview.
According to Aquinas, some truths about God (e.g., that God exists) can be known by anyone who carefully reflects on the natural order, while other truths about God (e.g., that He is triune) are known only because God has disclosed them to humanity by special revelation. But all of these are truths—they correspond to reality (who God really is and what He really is like). Although the latter truths cannot be philosophically demonstrated from nature, for Aquinas they can and should be rationally defended against objections to their truth. Truth is unified, knowable, and defensible, which makes apologetics both possible and crucial.
Aquinas did not deny the distorting effects of the fall on human thinking, but he emphasized that the fallen creation is a fallen creation. That is, fallen creation still bears the rational and moral marks of its Creator, and it still reflects, though in marred form, His creative intentions. Because all people are created in the image of God and live in a God-created world, believers and unbelievers share considerable common ground. And on that basis we can articulate reasons to believe in God that non-Christians are able to grasp, thus building bridges for the gospel.