Do You have a Consistent Worldview?

Probably not, especially if you are a young college student sitting under the complexity of different worldviews at your university or college.  Almost certainly not if you were raised as a Christian but were never taught why faith must come to bear with reason, or in fact why you believe what you believe.  And absolutely not if the first 2 are true and you were also raised in the south.  

Developing a consistent worldview is one of the most important pursuits you will ever meet.  This is the heart of living, for failing here, we fail everywhere.  Everybody has a worldview.  It is part of who we are as intrinsic beings and developed, or assumed, by our cultural makeup.  But not many people can say with certainty that their worldview is consistent or that it is carefully constructed.  James Sire says this about the establishment of a worldview, “Few people have anything approaching an articulate philosophy – at least as epitomized by the great philosophers.  Even fewer, I suspect, have a carefully constructed theology.  But everyone has a worldview… In fact, it is only the assumption of a worldview – however basic or small – that allows us to think at all.”

 A consistent worldview is not composed haphazardly by mixing in mulitiple ingredients from every different type of ideology and religious philosophy out there.  For instance, think of the forth-coming movie Eat, Pray, Love starring Julia Roberts.  This film portrays Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the New York Time’s Bestselling memoir of which the film is adapted, leaving her home after a wretched divorce to travel the world in search of what the world and its differing cultures have to offer.  After her divorce she met a medicine man of sorts who invites her to come study and travel the world with him.  In Italy, she ate and enjoyed life; in India, she sought after developing her spirituality; in Indonesia, she sought balance between the two and found love.  As a man, obviously this type of movie makes me shiver.  As a Christian man who desires consistency above all else, this movie makes me sick.  

Eat, Pray, Love is the perfect illustration of the inconsistent worldview that many young people occupy.  We often find ourselves casting aside consistency for happiness, tolerance, and our best life now.  We will eat, drink, and enjoy life without the foundation of an objective morality; we will pursue spiritual activities that are tolerant of everybody but those who hold to exclusive truth claims (which are most major religions); and we will always conditionally pursue love as if love is an emotion and not a consistent or perpetual action, even when the feeling is gone.  

So, how do we begin the process of developing and constructing a consistent worldview, one that is not composed tendentiously to fit a prejudiced conclusion?  According to Ravi Zacharias, we must “start with self-evident statements, both direct and indirect, and then proceed to the establishment of a truth-centered worldview.  When that is established, it must meet certain tests to distinguish knowledge from mere opinion” (The Real Face of Atheism, 173). 

In The Case for Christian Theism, Arlie J. Hoover listed a number of necessary components for establishing a worldview.  Zacharias mentions five of them, and adds a sixth while expounding upon each.  The following information comes from Appendix 2: The Establishment of a Worldview, in The Real Face of Atheism.

1.  A good worldview will have a strong foundation in correspondence; it will have factual support.  It will refuse that which is known to be false, and must harness all areas of reality without a selective sovereignty.  To exclude facts that challenge the thesis betrays a prejudice that distorts the worldview.  

2.  A good worldview should have a high degree of coherence or internal consistency.  A logically contradictory system cannot be true.  To be internally consistent it cannot have contradicting deductions, regardless of what ‘experiential needs’ are met in the process.  

3.  A good worldview has explanatory power.  The collation of facts leads to initial postulations, by which we devise our theories, our hypotheses, and then finally delineate our “laws.”  Facts ultimately do not speak for themselves; they help build a theory, or provide the prescriptive elements, the eyeglasses, through which we view the world..

4.  A good worldview will avoid two extremes.  A good worldview, therefore, is neither too simple nor too complex in its explanatory power.

5.  A good worldview has more than one line of evidence, not just one knockout argument.  Cumulative evidence converges from several sources of date.  In example, one by one the manager clicks on a series of lights, placed at different angles around the stage.  The full illumination from all the lights falls on the center of the stage.  When all the lights are on, you should be able to see the manager’s assertion in the center of the stage (Hoover, 52).  

6.  A worldview is not complete in itself until it is able to refute, implicitly or explicitly, contrary worldviews.  This is often a forgotten factor when arriving at a position.  The law of noncontradiction (that a statement and its opposite cannot both be true) applies not only within a worldview but also between worldviews.  Thus, it is more reasonable to say that all religions we know of are wrong than to assert that all are right.  Any system that opens its arms wide enough to incorporate everything will end up strangling itself when the arms close in.  

Any system that denies the law of noncontradiction fails the test of logical consistency because while denying it, it affirms the law at the same time.  Most eastern philosophers despise the law of noncontradiction, but they cannot get away from its ultimate reality.  The more they seek to dismantle it, the more it assaults them.  Many college professors seek to dismantle the Christian worldview without a foundational framework that provides consistency to the subjects of logic, morality, meaning, guilt, and death.  And many college students are walking into the academic classroom opening their arms to incorporate everything, only to end up strangling themselves with inconsistency when the arms close in.

I challenge you to think through your worldview.  Is it consistent?  Does it meet the above criteria?