To recap from yesterday: Stanley Fish, riffing on Barbara Hernstein Smith's new book on science/religion conflicts, highlights a recurrent theme of his thought--the surprising irrelevance of Absolute Truth to human life and thought. This is an argument he's made before (see "Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter." Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 389-416. Print.), but it's not one he's applied to the science/religion theatre of the culture wars.
I'm fascinated by Fish's arguments because I see them as posing an intriguing challenge to evangelical worldview analysis. As I've written about before, worldview analysis is a somewhat new (or at least resurgent) trend in some corners of evangelical thought. Drawing loosely on 1930s-style presuppositionalist apologetics, worldview evangelists posit that human beings move through the world with the help of worldviews, founding philosophies that on conscious and unconscious levels shape values, actions, assumptions, and reactions. Within worldview evangelism, Christians (a particular variety of Protestant Christian, at least) live within the "Biblical Christian" worldview. This worldview competes with other philosophies, be they alternative religions (e.g., the Hindu worldview, the Islamic worldview) or secular belief systems (e.g., naturalist materialism, marxism, postmodernism).
For worldview evangelists, of course, only the Christian worldview enjoys epistemic validity. It is True in a way that other worldviews are not. The task of the Christian, according to the worldview approach, involves 1) becoming conversant with the Christian worldview, learning to live it out more fully; 2) learning about competing worldviews, including how and why they are untrue; and 3) becoming adept at engaging people living within other worldviews, hopefully guiding them to a realization of the inferiority of their native worldviews relative to Christianity.
Fish--by no means a worldview analyst--presents a potent challenge to worldview analysts' assumptions. On one level, he is what most worldview evangelicals would call (or dismiss) as postmodern. That is, Fish does not (at least in his public writings) endorse the idea of Grand Truths that transcend particular times and places. One can believe in them with all one's heart. One can kill for them, die for them, and/or base one's whole life's work (artistic, political, philosophical, religious, what have you) on them. But what one cannot do is demonstrate once and for all that such Grand Truths really are Grand Truths. (Fish clarifies that he is actually referring to grand, philosophical truths and not to specific, mundane facts like "the sky is blue"). The point is that humans lack access to some Unambiguous Guarantor of Truth whose intervention and judgment would convince any and everyone of the truthiness of the Truth.
Worldview analysists tend to simplify such postmodernist beliefs: "Postmoderns don't believe in truth at all." The core of the worldview version of Biblical Christianity, see, is that Truth does exist, it comes from God, and is revealed more or less clearly and completely in the Bible. Other belief systems are flawed ultimately to the extent that they depart from, modify, or deny altogether Biblical Christianity's foundational truth.
Postmodernity, then, is especially scandalous, claiming not only that the Biblical Christian lacks the Ultimate Validity it claims, but that no worldview has such Ultimate Validity. Why? Because either such Ultimate Validity doesn't exist, or (at least) humans lack the ability to access the core of Transcendent Truth in an unmediated way.
Worldview evangelism departs at this point from other forms of Christian outreach and apologetics by refusing to go down the obvious avenue of direct engagement. Faced with a challenge like "I don't believe in Ultimate Truths" (or perhaps "Moral Absolutes"), worldview evangelists do not say "Well, they exist, whether you believe them or not!" Rather, worldview tactics train evangelists to ask questions, to probe the unbeliever's unbelief, catching them finally in a logical contradiction. The favorite for postmoderns? "Isn't the claim that there's no Ultimate Truth itself an Ultimate Truth?"
That's clever enough as it goes, but Fish's arguments are more radical than "there's no truth." At the end of the day, Fish contends, it really doesn't matter whether you believe, deep down, in Absolute Truth or in non-absolute, contingent little-t truths. Why? Because humans don't move through life double-checking every action, reaction, or thought for its conformity to some grand philosophy or worldview. Instead (I quote from Fish, who in turn is quoting Smith), "the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting" (qtd. in Fish, "Must").
In other words, most people live by doing and believing what seems to work, what proves "true," in localized contexts--not by fidelity to specific, all-encompassing philosophies. Science--operating empirically, deductively, via hypothesis and experimentation--works very well for some areas of life. Faith (or art, or sports, or love) works well in other areas. The fact that science and faith are mutually incapable of addressing each other's areas does not prevent people from drawing on both of them (sometimes at once, as when I pray while waiting for a medical test's results). This is as true, Fish insists, for postmodernists as it is for non-postmodernists. Holding and living by (at least potentially) logically contradictory sets of beliefs are just part of human existence.
For worldview analysts, though, logical contradiction within a worldview equals a death-blow for that worldview. Ditto non-comprehensiveness. Biblical Christianity (properly interpreted, of course) has no contradictions, explains everything exhaustively, and is therefore a superior worldview. The worldview evangelist assumes that, being brought to face a logical contradiction within their native (non-Christian) worldviews, nonbelievers will be shocked and disconcerted (and thus ready for the Holy Spirit to guide them into belief in Christ).
To be fair, many atheists place a similar trust in the power of their rhetoric to force believers into looking at the logical contradictions in Christianity (e.g., an all-powerful, loving God who allows earthquakes to devastate Haiti).
Fish, on the other hand, suggests that both die-hard atheists and die-hard evangelicals who make this assumption are in for a shock: most people are actually OK living in paradox, living without the unity of an all-encompassing, utterly harmonious philosophical system.
All this is not to say I agree totally with Fish. I do think there are reasons why faith or non-faith in Ultimate Truths do matter.
More tomorrow,
JF
Showing posts with label worldview apologetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worldview apologetics. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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
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
Monday, December 14, 2009
Worldview Evangelism
Grading down--now just a dissertation to read before 10:00 tomorrow!
As I was winding down from a day of grading, doing my half-hour on the elliptical (a device I refer to as "the sweating machine"), I listened to a podcast from an evangelist named Randal Niles called Think Again (formerly, I believe, Think it Thru). Niles runs a number of evangelical websites aimed at skeptics, atheists, and the Christians who want to reach them. The podcast I heard dealt especially with the notion of worldviews, which I've written about here previously.
Worldview refers of course to a set of ideas, assumptions, and attitudes that shape how one moves through the world. A number of philosophers formal and informal have dealt with ideas similar to worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) for some time (for an overview and comparison/contrast of these notions--from a strictly evangelical perspective--see David K. Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept). The term itself rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century various evangelical apologists latched onto as a way of conceiving of Christianity as a comprehensive, unified mode of interpreting the universe.
Today, worldview apologetics in some form or another has become the preferred mode of outreach for a growing number of evangelicals--thus my interest in the subject. Niles, the podcaster, even hosts a website (one of his "all about" series) called "All About Worldview," which contains a variety of informative and critical articles, many of which come from Summit Ministries, an established purveyor of worldview curricula, conferences, and worskshops.
I have only just begun to sample Niles's particular take on worldview apologetics, but from what I can tell, his version is similar to most others. It's a three-step process. First, Christians have to clarify and become proficient in articulating (and defending, and advocating) the "Christian worldview," more commonly (and more tellingly) called "Biblical worldview." Descriptions of this worldview typically consist of litmus-test affirmations about the inerrancy of scripture, the exclusive verity of Christian doctrines, the superiority of literal-scriptural accounts of science and history (i.e., young-earth creationism), and conservative views of gender and sexuality.
Next in the worldview evangelism approach, Christians should educate themselves about the other competing worldviews operating at present. Different worldview evangelists will categorize these systems differently, but most lists (tables, more commonly) will include, for example, "Naturalistic Humanism" (i.e., materialist science), postmodernism, "new age" or "pantheism," and Communism/Marxism . Also included are worldviews arising from competing faiths: the Islamic worldview, the Jewish worldview, the Hindu worldview, etc. Evangelists in training learn key features of these worldviews, identifying presuppositions and noting salient differences from the Biblical Christian view. Since, as per the Biblical worldview's presuppositions, only the Biblical approach can claim absolute epistemological accuracy, worldview apologetics teaches about other systems in terms of their divergence from the truth of scripture.
The final step involves training Christians to interact with people living in and seeing the world through these other (inferior) sets of lenses. Of course, the approach is more complicated than simply going up to someone and lecturing them about how mistaken their deeply held beliefs are. Worldview apologetics departs from most other confrontational evangelistic approaches, largely eschewing a Bible-thumping, in-your-face approach as unproductive. Instead, worldview evangelists seek to demonstrate that 1) the Christian worldview is in fact cohesive and epistemologically appealing; and 2) other worldviews, in comparison, prove unsatisfactory. The trick, then, is to know the other's (non-Christian) worldview better than the other person does, guiding the person conversationally through an exploration of that worldview, helping the person to see where the non-Christian worldview proves inconsistent ro contradictory (in Greg Koukl's words, showing people how and where their worldview "commits suicide").
This, as worldview evangelists will tell you, is no easy task. It requires training, research, conversational practice, and a willingness to explore--and if necessary repair--one's own faith.
I find much to admire in worldview apologetics of this sort. The openness to others--engage them on their own terms rather than hectoring them from afar--is a refreshing departure from the stereotypical "turn or burn" tactic (or, more gently, from the "if you died right now, do you know where you'd wake up?" gotcha questions of the Way of the Master). I also like how this approach resists the anti-intellectualism that even many evangelicals lament has long afflicted present-day evangelicalism. Worldview apologetics requires that the evangelist be well-read and well-equipped with an arsenal of rhetorical and critical skills. As an educator, I can hardly argue with the value of training people to recognize the difference between logical fallacies and strong arguments. Indeed, I see in worldview apologists the seeds of a new evangelicalism (recognizing, of course, that "the seeds of a new evangelicalism" get discovered by countless writers every day). Worldview evangelism, however, does in fact aim to be an articulation of Christianity that does not just survive but competes in the marketplace of ideas.
That being said, the notion of worldviews as so elaborated by Niles, Summit Ministries, and the like has some features I find less attractive...
More tomorrow,
JF
As I was winding down from a day of grading, doing my half-hour on the elliptical (a device I refer to as "the sweating machine"), I listened to a podcast from an evangelist named Randal Niles called Think Again (formerly, I believe, Think it Thru). Niles runs a number of evangelical websites aimed at skeptics, atheists, and the Christians who want to reach them. The podcast I heard dealt especially with the notion of worldviews, which I've written about here previously.
Worldview refers of course to a set of ideas, assumptions, and attitudes that shape how one moves through the world. A number of philosophers formal and informal have dealt with ideas similar to worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) for some time (for an overview and comparison/contrast of these notions--from a strictly evangelical perspective--see David K. Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept). The term itself rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century various evangelical apologists latched onto as a way of conceiving of Christianity as a comprehensive, unified mode of interpreting the universe.
Today, worldview apologetics in some form or another has become the preferred mode of outreach for a growing number of evangelicals--thus my interest in the subject. Niles, the podcaster, even hosts a website (one of his "all about" series) called "All About Worldview," which contains a variety of informative and critical articles, many of which come from Summit Ministries, an established purveyor of worldview curricula, conferences, and worskshops.
I have only just begun to sample Niles's particular take on worldview apologetics, but from what I can tell, his version is similar to most others. It's a three-step process. First, Christians have to clarify and become proficient in articulating (and defending, and advocating) the "Christian worldview," more commonly (and more tellingly) called "Biblical worldview." Descriptions of this worldview typically consist of litmus-test affirmations about the inerrancy of scripture, the exclusive verity of Christian doctrines, the superiority of literal-scriptural accounts of science and history (i.e., young-earth creationism), and conservative views of gender and sexuality.
Next in the worldview evangelism approach, Christians should educate themselves about the other competing worldviews operating at present. Different worldview evangelists will categorize these systems differently, but most lists (tables, more commonly) will include, for example, "Naturalistic Humanism" (i.e., materialist science), postmodernism, "new age" or "pantheism," and Communism/Marxism . Also included are worldviews arising from competing faiths: the Islamic worldview, the Jewish worldview, the Hindu worldview, etc. Evangelists in training learn key features of these worldviews, identifying presuppositions and noting salient differences from the Biblical Christian view. Since, as per the Biblical worldview's presuppositions, only the Biblical approach can claim absolute epistemological accuracy, worldview apologetics teaches about other systems in terms of their divergence from the truth of scripture.
The final step involves training Christians to interact with people living in and seeing the world through these other (inferior) sets of lenses. Of course, the approach is more complicated than simply going up to someone and lecturing them about how mistaken their deeply held beliefs are. Worldview apologetics departs from most other confrontational evangelistic approaches, largely eschewing a Bible-thumping, in-your-face approach as unproductive. Instead, worldview evangelists seek to demonstrate that 1) the Christian worldview is in fact cohesive and epistemologically appealing; and 2) other worldviews, in comparison, prove unsatisfactory. The trick, then, is to know the other's (non-Christian) worldview better than the other person does, guiding the person conversationally through an exploration of that worldview, helping the person to see where the non-Christian worldview proves inconsistent ro contradictory (in Greg Koukl's words, showing people how and where their worldview "commits suicide").
This, as worldview evangelists will tell you, is no easy task. It requires training, research, conversational practice, and a willingness to explore--and if necessary repair--one's own faith.
I find much to admire in worldview apologetics of this sort. The openness to others--engage them on their own terms rather than hectoring them from afar--is a refreshing departure from the stereotypical "turn or burn" tactic (or, more gently, from the "if you died right now, do you know where you'd wake up?" gotcha questions of the Way of the Master). I also like how this approach resists the anti-intellectualism that even many evangelicals lament has long afflicted present-day evangelicalism. Worldview apologetics requires that the evangelist be well-read and well-equipped with an arsenal of rhetorical and critical skills. As an educator, I can hardly argue with the value of training people to recognize the difference between logical fallacies and strong arguments. Indeed, I see in worldview apologists the seeds of a new evangelicalism (recognizing, of course, that "the seeds of a new evangelicalism" get discovered by countless writers every day). Worldview evangelism, however, does in fact aim to be an articulation of Christianity that does not just survive but competes in the marketplace of ideas.
That being said, the notion of worldviews as so elaborated by Niles, Summit Ministries, and the like has some features I find less attractive...
More tomorrow,
JF
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