IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN thirty-three years since this book was first published in 1976. Much has happened both in the development of worldviews in the West and in the way others and I have come to understand the notion of worldview.

In 1976 the New Age worldview was just forming and had yet to be given a name. I called it “the new consciousness.” At the same time the word postmodern was used only in academic circles and had yet to be recognized as an intellectually significant shift. Now, in 2009, the New Age is over thirty years old, adolescent only in character, not in years. Meanwhile postmodernism has penetrated every area of intellectual life, enough to have triggered at least a modest backlash. Pluralism and the relativism and syncretism that have accompanied it have muted the distinctive voice of every point of view. And though the third edition of this book noted these, there is now more to the stories of both the New Age and postmodernism. In the fourth edition I updated the chapter on the New Age and substantially revised the chapter on postmodernism.

In the fourth edition I also reformulated the entire notion of worldview. What is it, really? There have been challenges to the definition I gave in 1976 (and left unchanged in the 1988 and 1997 editions). Was it not too intellectual? Isn’t a worldview more unconscious than conscious? Why does it begin with abstract ontology (the notion of being) instead of the more personal question of epistemology (how we know)? Don’t we first need to have our knowledge justified before we can make claims about the nature of ultimate reality? Isn’t my definition of worldview dependent on nineteenth-century German idealism or, perhaps, the truth of the Christian worldview itself? What about the role of behavior in forming or assessing or even identifying one’s worldview? Doesn’t postmodernism undermine the very notion of worldview?

I took these challenges to heart. The result was twofold. First was the writing of Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (now in a second edition), originally published at the same time as the fourth edition of The Universe Next Door. There I addressed a host of issues surrounding the concept of worldview. Readers who are interested in the intellectual tool used in the fourth edition and this one will find it analyzed at much greater depth there. To do this, I was greatly aided by the work of David Naugle, professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University. In Worldview: The History of a Concept he surveyed the origin, development, and various versions of the concept from Immanuel Kant to Arthur Holmes and beyond, and he presents his own definition of the Christian worldview. It is his identification of worldview with the biblical notion of the heart that has spawned my own revised definition, which appears in chapter one of the fourth edition and the present book.

Readers of any of the first three editions will note that the new definition does four things. First, it shifts the focus from a worldview as a “set of presuppositions” to a “commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart,” giving more emphasis to the pretheoretical roots of the intellect. Second, it expands the way worldviews are expressed, adding to a set of presuppositions the notion of story. Third, it makes more explicit that the deepest root of a worldview is its commitment to and understanding of the “really real.” Fourth, it acknowledges the role of behavior in assessing what anyone’s worldview actually is. To further emphasize the importance of one’s worldview as a commitment, in this fifth edition I have added an eighth worldview question: What personal, life-orienting core commitments are consistent with this worldview?

Nonetheless, most of the analysis of the first four editions of The Universe Next Door remains the same. Except for chapter three on deism, which has been significantly expanded to account for the diversities within this worldview, only occasional changes have been made in the presentation and analysis of the first six of the eight worldviews examined. It is my hope that with the refined definition and these modest revisions the powerful nature of every worldview will be more fully evident.

Finally, there is one major worldview now affecting the West that I have not treated in any of the previous editions. Since September 11, 2001, Islam has become a major factor of life not only in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, but in Europe and North America as well. The Islamic worldview (or perhaps worldviews) now impinges on the lives of people around the globe. Moreover, the term worldview appears in daily newspapers when writers try to grasp and explain what is fueling the stunning events of the past few years. Unfortunately, I am not personally prepared to respond to the need for us in America to understand Islam’s understanding of our world. So I have asked Dr. Winfried Corduan, professor of philosophy and religion at Taylor University and author of a number of books but especially of Neighboring Faiths, to contribute a chapter on Islamic worldviews.1

One final comment on my motivation for the first edition. It has triggered numerous negative comments especially among Amazon.com reviewers who complain that the book displays a pro-Christian bias. They want an unbiased study. There is no such thing as an unbiased study of any significant intellectual idea or movement. Of course an analysis of worldviews will display some sort of bias. Even the idea of an objective account assumes that objectivity is possible or more valuable than an account from a committed and acknowledged perspective. C. S. Lewis, writing about his interpretation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, once commented that his Christian faith was an advantage. “What would you not give,” he asked, “to have a real live Epicurean at your elbow while reading Lucretius?”2 Here you have a real live Christian’s guide to the Christian worldview and its alternatives.

Furthermore, I first wrote the book for Christian students in the mid-1970s; it was designed to help them identify why they often felt so “out of it” when their professors assumed the truth of ideas they deemed odd or even false. I wanted these students to know the outlines of a “merely” Christian worldview, how it provided the foundation for much of the modern Western world’s understanding of reality, and what the differences were between the Christian worldview and the various worldviews that either stemmed from Christianity by variation and decay, or countered Christianity at its very intellectual roots. The book was immediately adopted as a text in both secular institutions—Stanford, the University of Rhode Island, and North Texas State, for example—and Christian colleges. Subsequent editions have been edited to acknowledge readers with other worldviews, but the Christian perspective has, without apology, not been changed.

In fact, the continued interest of readers in this book continues to surprise and please me. It has been translated into nineteen languages, and each year it finds its way into the hands of many students at the behest of professors in courses as widely divergent as apologetics, history, English literature, introduction to religion, introduction to philosophy, and even one on the human dimensions of science. Such a range of interests suggests that one of the assumptions on which the book is based is indeed true: the most fundamental issues we as human beings need to consider have no departmental boundaries. What is prime reality? Is it God or the cosmos? What is a human being? What happens at death? How should we then live? These questions are as relevant to literature as to psychology, to religion as to science.

On one issue I remain constant: I am convinced that for any of us to be fully conscious intellectually we should not only be able to detect the worldviews of others but be aware of our own—why it is ours and why, in light of so many options, we think it is true. I can only hope that this book becomes a steppingstone for others toward their self-conscious development and justification of their own worldview.

In addition to the many acknowledgments contained in the footnotes, I would especially like to thank C. Stephen Board, who many years ago invited me to present much of this material in lecture form at the Christian Study Project, sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and held at Cedar Campus in Michigan. He and Thomas Trevethan, also on the staff of that program, have given excellent counsel in the development of the material and in the continued critique of my worldview thinking since the first publication of this book.

Other friends who have read the manuscript and helped polish some of the rough edges are C. Stephen Evans (who contributed the section on Marxism), Winfried Corduan (who contributed the chapter on Islam), Os Guinness, Charles Hampton, Keith Yandell, Douglas Groothuis, Richard H. Bube, Rodney Clapp, Gary Deddo, Chawkat Moucarry, and Colin Chapman. Dan Synnestvedt’s review of the fourth edition sparked my vision for a fifth and provided guidance, especially for the chapter on deism. Recognition, too, goes to David Naugle, without whom my definition of a worldview would have remained unchanged. To them and to the editor of this edition, James Hoover, goes my sincere appreciation. I would also like to acknowledge the feedback from the many students who have weathered worldview criticism in my classes and lectures. Finally, which rightly should be firstly, I must thank my wife, Marjorie, who not only proofed draft after draft of edition after edition, but who suffered my attention to the manuscript when I had best attended to her and our family. Love gives no better gift than suffering for others.

Responsibility for the continued infelicities and the downright errors in this book is, alas, my own.