Worldviews are aplenty. There is, for instance, “A Christian Worldview” neatly mapped in the featured image — which I have gratefully borrowed from the site of the “Metro Praise International Church”. It obviously means to contrast its worldview to secular views of the world and, perhaps, also to other Christian worldviews. I am looking at it because it provokes some interesting questions about what worldviews. I am not so much concerned, on the other hand with the particular worldview expressed in the featured diagram – about which there is, of course, much to say.
The language of “worldviews” is familiar to us. We speak, for instance, of “the modern worldview” as against the medieval or the ancient one. We say of Aztecs, Communists, and “primitive man” that they have or had their view of the world. And we identify “pictures of them world” – “Weltbilder” to use the convenient German word – as the product of such worldviews. But what are worldviews and what are world pictures? And why do we need them? Or seem to need them? I have never seen as concise a depiction of a Christian worldview as the above image. It must be the work of a philosophically minded theologian with its pyramid of axioms and deductions, its certainties and opinions.
Seeing and Seeing-as
The diagram depicts the world view as a set of propositions with different cognitive status. Some are said to be axioms, others are presuppositions, a third group are the “theorems” that can be deduced from the preceding two, and then finally there are the mere opinions of empirical science. Why then do we need to speak of a view world and a resulting picture of the world? Is the language of vision and depiction just metaphorical? Do Christians actually “see” the world differently from non-Christians and is the modern way of “seeing” the world different the medieval one?
We moderns can certainly see things with the help of optical instruments that the medievals could not. We can see galaxies, for instance, and bacteria. We can see more things than our forbears and we perceive many things in different ways. Our “view” of the world differs in this way from that of the medievals. But when we consider more closely what is meant by “seeing something as something” we discover that the apparently sharp distinction between perception and belief is not we may have thought it to be. Our seeing something as something is characteristically connected with some beliefs about what we see. What we think of as a worldview may thus be a syndrome of perceptions and beliefs. We must conclude that a worldview is no more than a set of beliefs of which, at least, some are related to visual perceptions. That characterization is, of course, too vague to be fully satisfactory but it does tell us that worldviews ae not organic wholes but somewhat shaky composite structures.
A view of everything?
We speak of worldviews sometimes as if they were comprehensive visions of everything or possibly universal theories of everything. There are, of course, reasons to think that there are no such all-encompassing views or theories. But we need not think in that way and the above diagram manages to do so. It depicts the Christian world view, rather, as laying down a series of normative principles for adjudicating which beliefs should be treated as certain and which as conjectural.
It is, in fact, plausible to think of a world view as a set of beliefs of two different kinds. Some of them will be first-order beliefs about what there is in the world others are second-order beliefs about what cognitive status are to be assigned to beliefs.