I want to take a bit of time tackling a concept that looms large in the background or our now, and our every day.
This idea of worldview. If you've never thought about it, that's OK. Trust me on this, everyone has a worldview.
You might not be aware of it, but you have one.
In order to understand how the world works, and how other people work, then it's important to grapple with this concept.
I have worn glasses for as long as I can remember, until recently that is, when I had my cataracts done. As a kid I was always put down the back of the class. I never worked out why.
Because I was chronically short sighted I had to squint at the blackboard, yes, in those days they still used chalk, and often I wouldn't be able to make out what was written there.
I think it's a bit of an indictment on the education system of the day that kids like me were considered a bit dim because we just didn't get it.
Hey guys, I didn't get it because I couldn't see it!
Eventually with new glasses and a letter from my mother, I found my way up to the front of the class, and my grades improved.
So you could say that a world view puts the world in focus, like glasses, our worldview either helps us or hinders us from seeing the world in its reality.
When we don't see it right, it just doesn't make much sense. And because it doesn't make sense, we shrug it off and don't think about it.
A guy named Paul Hiebert, who is an anthropologist is quoted as saying "to lose the faith that there is meaning in life and in the universe is to lose part of what it means to be human."
We need to know and understand the why of the human condition and how we fit into the overall big picture.
The gift, and some would perhaps say the curse of being intelligent and self aware is that craving to understand what it all means.
But there is a bit of a problem here I think. Because we are taught more about science's interpretation of the reality around us we ask "how" more often than we ask "why?" It seems as if the why of the world has become something irrelevant, or something that is driven by consumer choice, and by our state of deep seated materialism. Our "how" bullies our "why" into taking it's bat and ball and going home.
Shame that. Because we miss out on a deeper level of understanding ourselves and our lives because of it.
I can't pull the sense of my reality, as I live it day to day, from some Hollywood movie. Much as I might enjoy a couple of hours of escapism, it's not how things are. The credits roll, the lights come up, and I have to remember where I parked my 25 year old car with the squeaky brakes.
And that's why worldview is important.
Does the pair of glasses I am wearing, actually show me a world where all the bits fit together and make sense in my here and now?
Does my worldview suit the world around me and help me to understand all that happens, or does it leave big blank spaces that glaringly avoid some of the more fundamental questions?
As Nancy Pearcey highlights, a worldview is a particular perception of reality, but, it's also the basis for the decisions a person makes.
Some time ago now an acquaintance of mine who was studying particle physics, asked me a question that I couldn't answer: "What is your personal ethos?" Like, huh? What's that supposed to mean? I had to look it up, I really did.
Ethos, it's Greek yeah? Fair enough.
My mother always sent me to look in our trusty dictionary when I didn't know what a word meant, and I learned from an early age that's what I needed to do. Sound out the word. And then look it up. It was the same with my many and varied questions. I was blessed by our Britannica which I would often sit and flip through, absorbed by what I found on it's pages.
Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, Ethos. Yes, it's a Greek word, was I even going to find it in my dictionary? Turns out it's there. It means Character or custom. Basically it's a personal moral nature or one's guiding beliefs. I guess what he was asking me was to define my worldview. Some thing I wasn't able to do at the time, as it wasn't something I have given any real thought to. Things just happen in the world. Right?
I accepted that's the way the world was, and I never really gave it much thought apart from that.
That's a pretty sad, cop out way of looking at things, isn't it? Not very satisfying emotionally, intellectually or spiritually. I think that's the state a lot of people find themselves in because, quite simply, they haven't thought about it. At all.
The Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy sat down with a bit of paper and a biro and he listed six questions he felt a burning need to answer:
- Why am I living?
- What is the cause of my existence and that of everyone else?
- Why do I exist?
- Why is there a division of Good and Evil within me?
- How must I live?
- What is death - how can I save myself?
These are heavy duty questions for a man who said, for 35 years he believed in nothing. Eventually he came to believe in the "doctrine of Jesus Christ." As a result his whole life underwent a transformation.
I wonder what was going on in his life that brought him to the point of deliberately sitting down and thinking about these topics? For me, it's always interesting to find out how other people tackle this stuff.
Tolstoy seems to be looking for something beyond himself to give meaning to his life.
Pierre Besushkof, one of the characters in Tolstoy's massive novel War and Peace, is described as "an overgrown child who seems to be lost in a wholly unfamiliar world." Later in the novel, Pierre meets a soldier who suggests that life has more meaning if you keep it simple. In terms of worldview, the more complicated we make it the less we understand what's going on around us.
When we are children we think and act like children. We see the world in the ways a child does. Goes without saying really. But the Bible tells us we need to put aside this childlike way of seeing things, and view the world with a deeper maturity, we need to bring Christ into our full understanding of how the world works.
And here we have the essence of a Christian world view. We must start with the existence of God. We can't and won't find any real meaning within ourselves. Gazing into the fluff of our belly buttons will give us little more than a deeper appreciating of the properties and place of lint.
As John Dickson says "Our individual lives will only find their true purpose when we connect with our source, God." That there is a God, underpins the whole of our Christian reality. It's the foundation upon which the framework of our understanding of the world and everything in it is build.
It's fitting to round off with the words of C.H. Spurgeon:
"The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the Great God whom he calls his Father."
Our purpose in life is to know God. "Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity."
And of course, the very best way of doing that, is by opening and studying the Bible.