Christian Worldview, Part IV – Competing Worldviews

Having defined the Christian worldview, I thought it would be helpful to examine some of the ways unbelievers differ in their view of the world. So we'll look at several non-Christian worldviews and I'll suggest a few ways Christians can challenge these unbelieving worldviews from a Christian perspective.

1. Naturalism
Naturalism is a worldview in which it is believed that nothing exists except matter. The natural world, a naturalist would say, is all there is. God does not exist. Human beings are complex machines which have evolved from lower life forms. Life itself is not the product of creation or design, but the product of nature operating in accordance with natural laws.

A challenge for the naturalist: Are laws material or immaterial? In a worldview in which it is believed that only matter exists, there is no room for abstract immaterial principles such as laws. But it seems that if a naturalist is going to appeal to such laws, that he or she must first account for them within the context of naturalism.

2. Empiricism
Empiricists believe that they can come to know things through their five senses. How do you know there is a tree out in the front yard? Well, you go out and look at it. This is the philosophical justification that underlies science. Science depends upon experiments in which hypotheses are tested through observation. And so someone who believes that science is the ultimate criterion of truth is, fundamentally, an empiricist.

A challenge for the empiricist: Given your metaphysic, why do you think your perceptions have objective meaning? In other words, what reason do you have to believe that the information you are seeing, touching, hearing, tasting, and smelling corresponds to any kind of objective reality?

Another challenge for the empiricist: Your five senses provide you with "raw facts." How are you able to interpret those facts? How do you account, for example, for the law of cause and effect? You might observe that the eight ball moves when it is struck by the cue ball. However, how do you know that the eight ball was caused to move by the cue ball?

3. Rationalism
Rationalism maintains that we can come to know things by way of human reason.

Rationalism is often associated with the French philosopher, Rene Descartes. Around the time of the Enlightenment, there was increasing skepticism about morality and the claims of the church. Descartes, who was a Roman Catholic, sought to establish a firm foundation from which he could dialog with these skeptics. And the way he went about this was that he tried to think of something to which he could not raise an objection. He sought a belief which he could not question as a foundation from which he could reason. Is the sky blue? Well, maybe I only perceive that the sky is blue and maybe my perceptions are mistaken. Am I standing in this room? Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m dreaming. And these aren’t necessarily the specific things that Descartes questioned, but this is the kind of thing that he did. What Descartes found was that he could question almost everything. The only thing, in fact, that he found he could not doubt was the fact that he was doubting, whence comes the dictum, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore, I am.” The only thing that Descartes could not doubt was that he was doubting. And since doubting is a form of thinking, Descartes concluded that he was thinking. And if he is thinking, he must exist in order to do the thinking. Therefore, he concluded, “I think, therefore, I am.” From there he went on to reason about other things.

This is rationalism. According to rationalism, we can know things ultimately by way of reason. Unlike Christian epistemology in which one’s knowledge is dependent upon God and his revelation, rationalism is a system in which it is believed that we don’t need God to tell us anything. We can figure it out on our own, thank you very much.

A challenge for the rationalist: How do you know your premises are true? Rationalism requires that one accept certain truths before he or she begins to reason. Consider the following syllogism:

Premise 1: Socrates is a man.
Premise 2: All men are mortal.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

In order to accept the conclusion of this syllogism, one must accept the truth of premises 1 and 2. But if all things must be demonstrated by reason if they are to be believed, we must prove premises 1 and 2 before we can accept the conclusion. But in order to accept premises in support of premises 1 and 2, we would have to prove those premises using other premises. Ultimately, unless we begin by accepting something as true apart from reason, this process would continue infinitely and we could never prove anything.

4. Nihilism
Nihilism is a philosophical system which some naturalists have embraced. Nihilists have reasoned this way. If all of reality is composed of impersonal matter, then we really have no reason to believe anything. Our thoughts, experiences, and perceptions, after all, would simply be the result of chemical processes which take place in our brains. Therefore, they conclude (and I think rightly given a naturalistic perspective), we don’t have any reason to believe that our thoughts correspond to any kind of objective reality. Therefore, we can’t know anything.

A challenge for the nihilist: How do you know that we can't know anything? Nihilism is self defeating in that it is a claim to knowledge.

5. Existentialism
Some philosophers found it difficult to live consistently as nihilists. They responded by affirming the truth of Nihilism, but then to they went on to make the moral affirmation that despite the fact that we can’t know anything and everything is therefore meaningless, we must rise above the meaningless and create our own meaning. This, it was believed, was the way out of a hopeless nihilistic. So, within existentialism, human experience becomes ultimate. How can we come to know things? We can come to know by way of our experience. By our experiences, we invent our own meaning.

A challenge for the existentialist: Why rise above the meaninglessness to create your own meaning? Existentialists will fall into arbitrariness as they attempt to answer this question.