An Illustration
It is really difficult to look at your glasses (while wearing them) when we are so in the habit of looking through them to take in all the beauty of this world. But for this short essay, we are going to urge you to consider your glasses—even if you don’t wear them!
Everyone is familiar enough with the purpose and function of glasses that we can use them as an illustration for beginning to understand ‘worldview’. Let’s start with this basic definition of worldview (and this really is only a start): A worldview is a lens through which we see the world, define the world, and make judgments about the world. Now let’s develop our ‘glasses’ illustration to help flesh out this idea:
It’s all fine to say that a worldview is like a pair of glasses, but we all know that simply having a pair of glasses on your face does not automatically correct our vision. There are several factors that can drastically effect the usefulness of our glasses. First, and most obviously: you must have lenses in the frames! You might think this goes without saying but there is a certain element of our culture that sees ‘glasses’ as nothing more than a fashion accessory. They want the look of glasses without the glass to look through! I have nothing against this segment of our population, but in terms of our worldview illustration—this is bad news!
More common though, are glasses that don’t have the correct lenses in them. The curvature of the lens is out of sync with what the wearer needs in order to see perfectly. And so there is distortion. This distortion can be throughout the whole spectrum of vision, or maybe just at a certain distance. But the distortion is real and it changes the way you see what is really there. A person may look like a tree, or an “F” may look like a “P”, and all kinds of chaos can ensue.
Another factor in the effectiveness of our glasses may be the way the lenses are colored. This is not a defect in the lenses, but it does still effect the way we see things. Polarized lenses are great for fishermen! I hear Rose-colored glasses are the best way to see things! Heavily tinted glasses may obscure certain objects in low-light situations. Colored lenses don’t appear as dangerous as the previous issues, but my only point is to illustrate that the lens does change the way you see reality.
We could add a few more issues like cracked or chipped lenses; smudged or smeared lenses; lenses that pop out of the frame without warning; glasses that are too small, too big, etc., but I think we get the point: Glasses are great, but only if they are the right glasses that actually help you clearly see the world that is really out there—not a distorted world.
This is a very basic way of understanding the concept of ‘worldview’. But in our illustration: everyone, without exception, wears glasses of some kind. Even more than that; everyone is born with these glasses, and they don’t know any different unless they are challenged to look at their glasses instead of only looking through them. That is to say that everyone has a worldview. Everyone sees the world through a particular set of lenses that will determine what that person sees, how they define what they see, and what judgments they will make about what they see; just like the different kinds of glasses we’ve described above in our illustration.
The Big Questions
There are questions that every single human being will ask in their lives. In fact, most lives could be described as “chasing an answer to these questions”—even if we aren’t always aware of it. There are probably a thousand different ways that we ask them, but when they are boiled down to their basic idea, we are all asking the same questions. Here are five core questions of humanity:
- Is there a “God”?
- How did we get here?
- What is our purpose?
- What is right and what is wrong?
- What is our destiny?
These really are the Big Questions of life! The way we answer these questions will reveal our worldview—and everyone tries to answer these questions. There are more we could add, but these will help us get a feel for how worldviews work in our lives and why it is so important that we learn to look at our glasses to better see through them.
The Definition
Now let’s go back to our very basic definition of a worldview and, keeping our glasses illustration in mind, unpack the three basic aspects of a worldview:
A worldview is a lens through which we (1)see the world, (2)define the world, and (3)make judgments about the world. (Just as a point of clarification: when we use the word ‘world’ here, we do not mean only the physical world. We mean everything that we encounter, visible and invisible; relationships, career, politics, economy, hobby…everything.)
- Seeing the world
- Defining the world
- Making judgments about the world
Seeing the world—This seems like the most obvious, but don’t overlook it. We cannot understand or interact with anything if we fail to see that there is a ‘something’ there to interact with! The most basic step in living in this world is first recognizing that there is ‘something’ and not ‘nothing’! Your worldview will strongly color or distort what is there. Depending on the condition of your ‘lenses’ you will perceive reality in a certain way. We emphasize this obvious point just to show that even at the most basic level of seeing something—our worldview is at work. There is a common saying among those of the world today, “Perception is reality.” They recognize that there is a problem with seeing—from the very start—what is really there. This is a problem for the unbeliever, not so for the Christian. We will discuss this later.
Defining the world— This is a sharpening and grasping of what we see. You first ‘see’ something, and then your mind takes in that image and recognizes a shape, or, is able to trace the lines that form what you see and by that process, you identify or define what you see. In our glasses illustration, a bad prescription might have us seeing men walking around who look like trees. We see an object, it could be a man, it could be a tree, but the shape is not clearly defined. Our worldview works in much the same way: Look back at our Big Questions and consider how an atheist would answer them. Then consider how a Christian would answer. An atheist will see a human, and a Christian will see that same human, but they will define that human in very different ways because of their answers to those Big Questions—because of their worldview. And how we define things greatly effects how we act toward those things…
Making judgments about the world— Once we see something and once we define it, we then naturally move to taking action of some sort with respect to that something. It may be a mental action (like charting a path or a plan to interact with that ‘something’) or physical action (running away from that ‘something’), but we make a judgment call on the thing that we have seen and defined. We act or react to what we have seen and that action interacts with a whole network of other variables and factors. But it is your worldview that is the foundation of all these aspects.
The Best For Last
So far in this post I have broken one of my most important rules: I am defining and promoting a strong conviction without first establishing the biblical basis and standard for it. Up to this point, for the most part, anyone could have written this little blurb. A pagan, a Muslim, an atheist…you name it. But as Christians, we must always be in the habit of asking, “Is there a biblical warrant for buying into this?” Couldn’t this whole worldview thing simply be just another apple plucked off the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Good question! Part 2 of Worldview Matters will discuss the most important aspect of Worldview: It’s biblical basis and requirement! That’s right, we are called by God Himself to think and live worldview-ishly!
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