Some Difficulteis with Worldviews

Just a quick note--I'll be visiting my in-laws for a few days, and internet access is likely to be sketchy to non-existent. Don't be surprised, then, if I take a few days off posting.

Back to the worldview evangelism topic from a few days ago. Briefly, worldview analysis posits that people's beliefs and behaviors stem from their worldview, meaning a related set of foundational ideas, values, and assumptions about reality. These foundational attitudes are largely presuppositional or pre-rational, though they may be susceptible to rational inquiry or criticism. The evangelist's task involves sharpening a sense of her own (Biblical Christian) worldview, learning to recognize and critique other worldviews, and becoming adept at interacting with those living in other worldviews, eventually leading them to recognize the superiority of the Biblical-Christian view.

I suggested that worldview analysis represents a positive trend in evangelicalism in that it insists upon critical thinking, self-reflection, and respectful interchange with non-Christians. It is, in any case, a step back from the tone-deaf, "Jesus: take him or leave him, culture!" approach to evangelism (manifested, I think, in artifacts like the CHRIST-mas tree).

That being said, though, the worldview approach itself depends upon a number of warrants that upon reflection seem at least questionable. Let me touch on a few of these:

* The coherence of worldviews: I don't doubt that much of what we do and believe and humans relies not on consciously worked-out, rational processes but on inchoate presuppositions we absorb from culture or family. People live their entire lives, after all, without necessarily systematizing their thought processes. It is less clear to me, though, that our presuppositions or unexamined assumptions about life necessarily group themselves into something as coherent as a worldview that can be identified or diagnosed. Worldview analysis seems to work best with people who already think of their beliefs and values systematically, and then only with those whose systematization matches the descriptions of worldview analysts.

* The definition of worldviews: Lists of various worldviews that I've seen tend to include a wide range of different religions, philosophies, or thought-belief systems. Some of these (like Marxism) are fairly well-defined, formal systems, products of the work of specific philosophers (i.e., Marx and Engels) credited with shaping the system in question. Others, such as postmodernism, name not a specific philosophy but a general trend, style, or era. They have some key interpreters (Jean-Francois Lyotard, for instance), but by nature they lack the orthodox formality of specific philosophies. Still others are religions, like Islam or Hinduism, that identify as vast a range of variants as Christianity does.

The problem here is that worldview analysis forces each of these very different categories into the same conceptual box--the worldview. Such a gesture does violence to the specificity and/or multiplicity of the systems themselves, turning them all into variants of the same thing. Worse, worldview analysis suggests a degree of exclusivity among worldviews--you're one of these, not two or three of them--that many people would balk at accepting. Evolutionary biologists, for instance, typically get categorized automatically as living under the "naturalist science" or "materialist humanism" worldview, even though many of them would also describe themselves as Christian, postmodern, New Age, Marxist, or any number of other worldviews. Worldview analysis proves too simplistic a tool to account for such blended systems.

* The worldview of worldviews: Worldview analysis shows its 19th century origins in its fondness for categorization and taxonomy, a favored post-enlightenment mode of creating and disseminating knowledge. Worldview apologists typically operate by identifying and listing the major competing worldviews as they see them, summarizing these viewpoints into a grid or table for easy comparison/contrast (see pages C-1 through C-4 of this document, for example). Distinguishing features codified on such a grid might include "view of Truth," "main proponents," "primary values," and the like. The complicating factor here, though, is that putting so many divergent worldviews on the same table assumes that, no matter how different the worldviews in question are, they are all amenable to being described and analyzed with the same set of sub-categories.

Perhaps they are. But I think it more likely that the worldview grids that analysts create are themselves the products of a particular worldview, a meta-worldview, if you like, that presupposes "truth" to be a thing that can be atomized, subdivided, and arranged in tabular format. This is itself a particular viewpoint at odds with other viewpoints past and present. Indeed, I imagine many Christian thinkers from history (or even from today) would find this system foreign.

Many worldview thinkers, of course, are themselves aware of these questions and limitations. They are careful to use worldview analysis as a heuristic, a rule of thumb to get Christians to think about themselves in relation to others, rather than as Divine Truth. But the curricula about worldviews that I've seen tends to dumb down an already simplified and simplifying notion.

More tomorrow (or perhaps next week),

JF