on worldviews (I)

Seeking to determine the justifiability of the Judeo-Christian worldview, a word on worldviews must certainly be made. To quote N.T. Wright in The New Testament and the People of God, “Worldviews are the basic stuff of human existence, the lens through which the world is seen, the blueprint for how one should live in it, and above all the sense of identity and place which enables human beings to be what they are.” (124) Worldviews are normative, in the sense that they claim to speak to the whole of reality rather than to bits & pieces. Worldviews are invisible but vital to life, the lenses through which people understand and interpret the world around them. One’s worldview is the grid around which she organizes reality; as much as we’d like to think we wrap our worldviews around reality, the opposite is actually the case. Everyone has a worldview: even the relativist, declaring that all worldviews are equally valid despite being contradictory, is himself operating within a worldview, within a story around which reality is molded. Many of us aren’t aware of our worldviews until they’re challenged, and many of us claim to hold a certain worldview while actually holding quite a different one: what we say we believe is rendered valid or invalid dependent upon the way we actually live and operate in the world. What a person habitually does, the way a person organizes and lives his life, is more an indicator of one’s worldview rather than the claims that person may vocally make. 

 Back to the issue at hand: when it comes to worldviews, how do we determine if they are justifiable? How do we determine if they can be held by reasonable, thinking, intelligent people? When it comes to the sciences, any hypothesis is considered valid if it (a) makes sense of the data, (b) does so with simplicity, and (c) carries weight into matters beyond its own. When it comes to worldviews, we can’t prove this or that one is true or that this or that one is false. There’s simply no such thing as objective proof. Validating a worldview happens when the worldview makes more sense of the world than the alternate worldviews, when the worldview handles all the little details of our world with elegance and simplicity, and when the worldview sheds light on the grayer areas of our world. This is, in a nutshell, what I’ve been trying to determine: “Does Christianity make sense of our world better than the competing stories? Does Christianity handle all the quirks and quagmires of our world with simplicity? Does Christianity bring light to issues outside its immediate concern?” The answer I’m advocating is YES to all of these, but I’m getting ahead of myself.