Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; / world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch,
matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
WE HAVE NOW EXAMINED eight basic worldviews, seven if we don’t count nihilism, or nine if we count both forms of existentialism separately.
Or eleven, if we add the briefly mentioned animism and the postmodern perspective. But who is counting? We could multiply worldviews to fit the number of conscious inhabitants of the universe at any one time—or at all times if we take an Eastern twist or if we see the universe from the aspect of eternity. On the contrary, we could say that there is one basic worldview composed of one proposition: Everyone has a worldview!1
Still, we may ask, are these the only choices? Where is the Playboy philosophy? And what about the artist who “creates” to bring order out of the chaos of life? These options certainly have adherents. Yet when we examine each option, we find that each is a subdivision or specific version of one or more of those already discussed. Hedonistic Playboy philosophy is an unsophisticated version of naturalism. People are sex machines; oil them, grease them, set them in motion, feel the thrill. Wow! Pure naturalism in which the good is what makes you feel good and, with any luck, doesn’t hurt anyone else.
Aestheticism—the worldview of a person who makes art out of life in order to give form to chaos and meaning to absurdity—is considerably more sophisticated and attractive. Its adherents (people like Walter Pater in the late nineteenth century and Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Somerset Maugham, Pablo Picasso, Leonard Bernstein in the twentieth) are often personally attractive, even charismatic. But aestheticism is a form of existentialism in which the artist makes value, endowing the universe with a certain formality and order. The code hero of Hemingway is a case in point. His ethical norms are not traditional, but they are consistent. He lives by his own rules, if not the rules of others. The roles Humphrey Bogart played in Key Largo, Casablanca, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre have given this worldview a more than professional dimension and have taken aestheticism (life as a certain style) into the marketplace. Nonetheless, aestheticism is just a specific type of atheistic existentialism in which people choose their own values and make their own character by their choices and actions. We have seen in chapter six where that leads.
The fact is that while worldviews at first appear to proliferate, they are made up of answers to questions that have only a limited number of answers. For example, to the question of prime reality, only two basic answers can be given: either it is the universe that is self-existent and has always existed, or it is a transcendent God who is self-existent and has always existed. Christian and Islamic theism and deism as well claim the latter; naturalism, Eastern pantheistic monism, New Age thought, and postmodernism claim the former. As one theologian put it, either the present universe of our experience has had a personal origin or it is the product of the impersonal, plus time, plus chance.2
Or to take a different example, to the question of whether one can know something truly or not there are only two possible answers: one can either know or not know something about the nature of reality. If a person can know something, then language in which that knowledge is expressed in some way corresponds unequivocally to reality and the principle of noncontradiction operates. Postmodernism’s rejection of this notion is self-referentially incoherent.
To say that we can know something true does not mean we must know exhaustively what is true. Knowledge is subject to refinement, but if it is true knowledge, there must have been at least a grain of truth in one’s unrefined conception. Some aspect of that conception has to remain as it was in the beginning, or it was not knowledge. For example, ancient people observed the sun move in the sky. We know that the sun stands still and the earth turns. But our knowledge includes the truth of the ancients’ observation; the sun appears to rise as much to us as it did to them. In any case, if we can know something about reality, this rules out the infinite number of possible explanations suggested by conceptual relativism. In that system we cannot know what is actually the case. We are bound within the borders of our language system. This is essentially nihilism.
There are likewise a limited number of choices regarding the notion of time. Time is either cyclical or linear; it either goes someplace (that is, is nonrepeatable) or eternally returns (and thus does not exist as a meaningful category). And there are a limited number of choices regarding basic ethics and metaphysics and questions about personal survival at death. And so on.
Worldviews, in other words, are not infinite in number. In a pluralistic society they seem to exist in profusion, but the basic issues and options are actually rather small. The field, as I have narrowed it, contains eleven options (or ten, or eight—our counting problem!). Our own personal choice lies somewhere on this field, but if the argument of this book is valid, two conclusions follow. First, our choice need not be blind. There are ways to bring light to the paths from which we choose. Second, whatever choice we make, if we are not going to be hypocritical, we are committed to live by it. As indicated in the very definition of worldview, we “live and move and have our being” in accordance with the worldview we really hold, not the one we merely confess. A fearless honesty should characterize both our self-analysis—where we are now—and our pursuit of truth.
CHOOSING A WORLDVIEW
How, then, should we choose to live? How can we decide among the finite alternatives? What can help us choose between a worldview that assumes the existence of a transcendent, personal God and one that does not? Something of my own view of this matter should certainly have become obvious in the descriptions and critiques of the various options. Now is the time to make this view explicit.3
Unless each of us begins by assuming that we are in our present state the sole maker and meaning-giver of the universe—a position held by few even within the New Age worldview—it would be well to accept an attitude of humility as a working frame of reference. Whatever worldview we adopt will be limited. Our finitude as human beings, whatever our humanity turns out to be, will keep us both from total accuracy in the way we grasp and express our worldview and from completeness or exhaustiveness. Some truths of reality will slip through our finest intellectual nets, and our nets will have some holes we have not even noticed. So the place to start is humility. We do tend to adopt positions that yield power to us, whether true or not.
But humility is not skepticism. If we expect to know anything, we must assume we can know something. And with that assumption other elements are entailed, primarily the so-called laws of thought: the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle. By following such laws we are able to think clearly and be assured that our reasoning is valid. Such assumptions, then, lead to the first characteristic that our adopted worldview should possess—inner intellectual coherence. Keith Yandell of the University of Wisconsin states this succinctly: “If a conceptual system contains as an essential element a (one or more membered) set of propositions which is logically inconsistent, it is false.”4
It is on this basis that the worldviews of deism, naturalism, pantheistic monism, and so forth were examined in the preceding chapters. Each was found inconsistent at some major points. Naturalists, for example, declare the universe to be closed on the one hand, and yet most naturalists affirm that human beings can reorder it on the other hand. If my argument is correct, we have seen that for us to be able to shape or reorder our environment, we must be able to transcend our immediate environment. But since naturalism declares we cannot do this, naturalism is inconsistent and cannot be true, at least as it is normally formulated.5
A second characteristic of an adequate worldview is that it must be able to comprehend the data of reality—data of all types: that which each of us gleans through our conscious experience of daily life, that which are supplied by critical analysis and scientific investigation, that which are reported to us from the experience of others. All these data must, of course, be carefully evaluated on the lowest level first (is it veridical? is it illusory?). But if the data stand the test, we must be able to incorporate them into our worldview. If a ghost refuses to disappear under investigation, our worldview must provide a place for it. If a man is resurrected from the dead, our system must explain why that could happen. To the extent that our worldview denies or fails to comprehend the data, it is falsified, or at least shown to be inadequate.
It is just such a challenge to naturalism that has caused some to accept theism as an alternative. The historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ, and for various other “miracles,” has been found by many to be so heavy that they have abandoned one conceptual system for another. Conversions to Christianity, especially among intellectuals in our time, are almost always accompanied by changes in worldview, for sin, as seen by the Bible, has an intellectual as well as a moral dimension.6
Third, an adequate worldview should explain what it claims to explain. Some naturalists, for example, explain morality by reference to the need to survive. But as we saw, this is explaining the moral quality (ought) solely by reference to the metaphysical quality (is). Perhaps the human species must develop a concept of morality in order to survive, but why should it survive? And it is no good responding with B. F. Skinner, “So much the worse” for us if we do not survive, for that just begs the question.
The crucial questions, then, to ask of a worldview are, How does it explain the fact that human beings think but think haltingly, love but hate too, are creative but also destructive, wise but often foolish, and so forth? What explains our longings for truth and personal fulfillment? Why is pleasure as we know it now rarely enough to satisfy completely? Why do we usually want more—more money, more love, more ecstasy? How do we explain our human refusal to operate in an amoral fashion?
These are, of course, huge questions. But that is what a worldview is for—to answer such questions, or at least provide the framework within which such questions can be answered.
Finally, a worldview should be subjectively satisfactory. It must meet our sense of personal need as a bowl of hot oatmeal breaks the fast of a long night’s sleep. I mention satisfaction last because it is the most ephemeral quality. If it were first, it would suggest that subjectivity is the most important factor, and it would also beg the question. To say an adequate worldview must satisfy is to talk in circles; the question is, how can a worldview satisfy? And the answer, I believe, is clear: a worldview satisfies by being true. For if we think or even remotely suspect that something in our grasp of reality is illusory, we have a crack that may widen into a fissure of doubt and split the peace of our world into an intellectual civil war. Truth is ultimately the only thing that will satisfy. But to determine the truth of a worldview, we are cast back on the first three characteristics above: internal consistency, adequate handling of data, and ability to explain what is claimed to be explained.
Still, subjective satisfaction is important, and it may be lack of it that causes us to investigate our worldview in the first place. The vague, uneasy feeling we have that something doesn’t fit causes us to seek satisfaction. Our worldview is not quite livable. We bury our doubt, but it rises to the surface. We mask our insecurity, but our mask falls off. We find, in fact, that it is only when we pursue our doubts and search for the truth that we begin to get real satisfaction.7
Where, then, are we today? In terms of possible worldviews, our options are numerous but, as we have seen, limited. Of those we have investigated, all but theism were found to have serious flaws. If my argument has been correct, none of them—deism, naturalism, existentialism, Eastern pantheistic monism or New Age philosophy, nor the postmodern perspective—can adequately account for the possibility of genuine knowledge, the facticity of the external universe, or the existence of ethical distinctions. Each in its own way ends in some form of nihilism.
Islam poses both an alternative and a separate challenge. Because it is based on a theistic notion of God as creator, sustainer, and revealer of the truths of reality, the most foundational worldview notion (the nature of ultimate reality) is similar to that of Christianity. Searchers for truth will need to look more intently at specific details of each worldview—possible internal inconsistencies and, especially, the differing conceptions of the nature and character of Allah and the biblical God, the historical evidence for the nature and character of Jesus, and the reasons for the authority accorded to their two foundational scriptures, the Bible and the Qur’an. This is a task that here must be left to you as readers.8
CHRISTIAN THEISM REVISITED
There is one worldview that offers both a firm intellectual foundation and a route out of such nihilism. For those who follow the decline of religious certitude through its trek from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, the way forward is not to go beyond nihilism. It is rather to return to an early fork in the intellectual road.
It may seem strange to suggest that we throw off modern and postmodern thought and return to the seventeenth century. But we should be reminded that Christian theism as I have defined it was culturally abandoned not because of its inner inconsistency or its failure to explain the facts, but because it was inadequately understood, forgotten completely, or not applied to the issues at hand. Moreover, not everyone abandoned theism three centuries ago. There remain at every level in society and in every academic discipline—in science and the humanities, in technology and the business world—those who take their Christian theism with complete intellectual seriousness and honesty.9
Questions and rough edges—indeed theism has those. And there are problems. Finite humanity, it would seem, must be humble enough to recognize that any worldview will always have those. But theism explains why we have such questions and problems. Its ground is neither the self nor the cosmos, but the God who transcends all—the infinite-personal God in whom all reason, all goodness, all hope, all love, all reality, all distinctions find their origin. It provides the frame of reference in which we can find meaning and significance. It stands the fourfold test for an adequate worldview.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nineteenth-century Jesuit poet whose own intellectual journey provides a fascinating study of how a searching mind and heart can find a resting place, has left us a rich vein of poems that embody the Christian worldview. None, I think, better captures the tone of Christian theism than “God’s Grandeur,” and it will put a fitting personal close to our rather intellectual consideration of worldviews:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.10
Of course, there is much more to be said about the personal and theological dimensions of this way of looking at life.11 To accept Christian theism only as an intellectual construct is not to accept it fully. There is a deeply personal dimension involved with grasping and living within this worldview, for it involves acknowledging our own individual dependence on God as his creatures, our own individual rebellion against God, and our own individual reliance on God for restoration to fellowship with him. And it means accepting Christ as both our Liberator from bondage and the Lord of our future.
To be a Christian theist is not just to have an intellectual worldview; it is to be personally committed to the infinite-personal Lord of the universe. And it leads to an examined life that is well worth living.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. Why is humility important in considering worldviews, and how is it different from skepticism?
2. What do you think of the reasons the author gives for choosing Christian theism?
3. How can the characteristics of an adequate worldview listed in this chapter help you understand your own beliefs and commitments and those of others?