Appendix 2: The Establishment of a Worldview
2
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 simple—that allows us to think at all.
—James Sire
We enter here into what may be legitimately called the heart of the process; for failing here, we fail everywhere. The necessary ingredients that make up a worldview are not thrown together in a haphazard fashion. Neither are they composed tendentiously to fit a prejudiced conclusion. Starting with self-evident statements, both direct and indirect, we proceed to the establishment of a truth-centered worldview. When that is established, it must meet certain tests to distinguish knowledge from mere opinion.
In The Case for Christian Theism, Arlie J. Hoover listed a number of necessary components for establishing a worldview. I shall mention five of them, and then add one more important aspect.
1. A good worldview will have a strong foundation in correspondence; it will have factual support. Conversely, it will refuse that which is known to be false. It must harness all areas of reality and not retain a selective sovereignty. To refuse to include facts that challenge the thesis or to arbitrarily make some subservient to others because they better fit a predetermined conclusion 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.
Let me illustrate these two characteristics of correspondence and coherence. Some years ago I was able to witness a criminal trial involving child rape at the Old Bailey in London. The Old Bailey Courthouse has addressed some of the most publicized criminal cases in the history of London (Oscar Wilde was on trial there in 1895). The atmosphere was tense, filled with all of the attendant emotions—agony, anger, and drama. It became very clear that the attorneys were seeking to do two things. First, they wanted to bring either certainty or doubt into the allegations, depending upon the client they represented. Second, they wanted to determine how the alleged facts all fit together. They explored issues such as time and location by questioning witnesses, and with this wealth of information they tried to show either coherence or incoherence.
It was impossible to listen to these proceedings without realizing that truth could not stand on isolated statements: it had to fit the alleged story. Further, it was impossible to escape the fact that whichever way the judgment went, it would change the lives of the principals involved unalterably. Such a scenario, with all its implications, must be enacted scores of times every day in our world. The pursuit of correspondence to fact and the coherence of the whole, even in specific beliefs, cannot be expunged from the process of reaching accurate conclusions. This is true in court trials and in every other aspect of life.
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.” United facts and integrated deductions lead to systems. Facts ultimately do not just 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. This means, said Hoover, that a good worldview will be neither too simple nor too complex. He uses the famous “Occam’s razor test.” William of Occam (1300–1349) supposedly said, “Do not multiply entities without necessity,” which basically means that we are to resist the temptation to make our explanations too complex. If an explanation becomes too complex, Occam’s razor will cut it off. On the other hand, an explanation should not become so simplistic that it commits the reductive fallacy. To make man an incomprehensible entity is to go to one extreme. To consider a man a mere brute is to reduce him to the other extreme. 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 data. Hoover’s illustration of the metaphysician being like a good stage manager is excellent. 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.[1]
To Hoover’s five, I add this important sixth component.
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.
Most Eastern philosophers despise the law of noncontradiction, but they cannot shake its life-sized reality. The more they seek to assault the law of noncontradiction, the more it assaults them. For this very reason, and in recognition of its undeniability, an Eastern mystic said, “It is better to remain silent, for when the mouth opens, all are fools.” The problem is that his mouth opened to tell us that. One may as well talk of a one-ended stick as to deny the law of noncontradiction.
Since our goal is to arrive at a worldview that meets these aforementioned tests, let me propose the approach that will accomplish that.
Human beings are unquestionably multisensory, or multifaceted, and the intimations of reality come to us from a diversity of sources. Therefore, it stands to reason that no one test will capture all of reality. The combination of several truth tests, harnessing their strengths and eliminating their weaknesses, would be the ideal path to take. This method is often called combinationalism, or systematic consistency, for it combines several methods to arrive at logical consistency, empirical adequacy, and experiential relevance.
In his book Christian Apologetics, Norman Geisler considered these three tests in combinationalism inadequate, unless preceded by two others, which he calls “unaffirmability as a test for falsity” and “undeniability as a test for truth.” For readers who wish to pursue this, the reading would be well worth the effort. Geisler’s reasoning is that systematic consistency is only appropriate within a worldview; it does not eliminate the possibility of other views being true. I think this judgment is merely the fine tuning of the process, because the threefold test of logical consistency, empirical adequacy, and experiential relevance ought to incorporate the unaffirmability and undeniability tests. For example, 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. In the same way, when one attempts to deny his existence he fails the test of experiential relevance because he is using his own existence to deny it. The undeniability and unaffirmability tests, whether seen separately from combinationalism or inherent within it, are crucial for truth testing and prevent any escape attempts of a worldview to deny reality.
The Final Approach
I have selected the combinational method because the defense of any position, sooner or later, finds itself ultimately in this terrain, reluctantly or otherwise. Winston Churchill, speaking of secretive war strategy, once said that the truth was so valuable that it had to be protected by a bodyguard of lies. This estimate applies to all of life’s pursuits, though not always by intention. Truth is often avoided, or eludes us, because of a smokescreen of lies leading us the wrong way.
Let me use another analogy for a moment. Imagine a circle, with truth at the center, often hindered by a coarse periphery of resistance. Although various attempts are made to get to the center, entry is possible only by a certain approach. The closer one gets to the center, the more indispensable is systematic consistency. Even the revered Hindu philosopher Shankara, with his strong bent for a logic that is supposedly Eastern and his repeated attempts to elude the law of noncontradiction, nevertheless goes to great lengths to justify or offer his “cohesive” conclusions. The gravitational pull of the center makes consistency inescapable.
In summary, I frame my methodology in a three-four-five grid. The three tests (logical consistency, empirical adequacy, and expediential relevance) must be able to give truthful and consistent answers to the four questions of our origin, condition, salvation, and destiny. These four areas, in turn, will have to deal with five topics: God, reality, knowledge, morality, and humankind; or theology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and anthropology. One may reverse this sequence and say that, on the basis of a study of these five areas, the answers to the four questions lie in the truth tests of the three components of systematic consistency. Then the conceptual framework, or the glasses through which we see this world, makes for a strong foundation in understanding reality and is able to deal with truth and error.[2]