Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Read Free

of his answers. Unless he has extranatural information, he must now say the same thing as the naturalist: “That’s just the way it is.” 3
    Naming the Elephant
    This story illustrates two primary characteristics of a worldview. First is the fact that our primary foundational commitments are just that— commitments , that is, presuppositions. They are what we come to when we can no longer explain why it is we are saying what we are saying. Second is the character of the question the young boy asks. He asks what is the case, not how we know or believe that it is the case. And the father answers in kind. I want to say from the beginning that I think the young boy asked the right question in the right way and the father likewise answered—whether as a theist or a naturalist—in the right way.
    There are other ways to tell the story, other ways for the father to begin his series of answers, but his answers represent a foundational principle in the two worldviews most common in the Western and Middle Eastern world: naturalism and theism. We will examine one other story later. 4 For now my point is simple. At the base of all our thought—all our ruminations about God, ourselves and the world around us—is a worldview.
    What Is a Worldview?
    This book arises out of two primary circumstances. The first is my own dissatisfaction with the way I defined a worldview in the first edition of The Universe Next Door in 1976. Because the definition is so rooted in my own mind and has been disseminated widely to students over the past quarter of a century, I will begin this book with it and then raise the issues that have seemed to me most problematic about it. In subsequent chapters I will address these issues in hopes of bringing clarity to the worldview concept and conclude with a redefinition that embodies my conclusions.
    The second circumstance is the publication of David Naugle’s Worldview: The History of a Concept , which has provided a rich source of information on the way this term and concept have developed. It has precluded my own need for extensive historical research.
    What, then, is a worldview? The definition which appears in the first three editions of The Universe Next Door is this: A worldview is a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world.
    The first thing every one of us recognizes before we even begin to think at all is that something exists. In other words, all worldviews assume that something is there rather than that nothing is there. This assumption is so primary most of us don’t even know we are assuming it. 5 We take it as too obvious to mention. Of course something is there!
    Indeed it is. And that’s just the point. If we do not recognize that, we get nowhere. Still, as with many other simple “facts” that stare us in the face, the significance may be tremendous. In this case the apprehension that something is there is the beginning of conscious life—as well as of two branches of philosophy: metaphysics (the study of being) and epistemology (the study of knowing).
    What we discover quickly, however, is that once we have recognized that something is there, we have not necessarily recognized what that something is. And here is where worldviews begin to diverge. Some people assume (with or without thinking about it) that the only basic substance that exists is matter. For them, everything is ultimately one thing. Others agree that everything is ultimately one thing but assume that that one thing is spirit or soul or some such nonmaterial substance.
    But we must not get lost in examples. We are now concerned with the definition of a worldview as such. A worldview is composed of a number of basic presuppositions, more or less consistent with each other, more or less consciously held, more or less true. These presuppositions are generally