Worldview Development

If there is no agreement on how a truth is measured and added to one’s worldview then there cannot be much progress in talking about particulars of truth. While it is very true that establishment of the existence of God logically precedes the details about who that God may or may not be, I think we need to delve further back to epistemological principals before traversing through the potential truths.

If some commonality is not found at that level then it is like trying to play chess with the game rules for checkers.

In developing a worldview we must remember that it will always be developing, adapting, and evolving to encompass more and more truth as we learn it. There has to be room for revision and removal of inaccurate perspectives as we grow in truth and knowledge. I propose that one needs to measure all things that make up ones worldview by three tests of truth.

First does the thing line up philosophically as true? This is the ethereal, but important level of examining a worldview. Is it logical? Is it true? Is it right? Is it consistent with other known truths? Or are their logical inconsistencies? Are there fundamental philosophical problems with the hypothesis?

Secondly can it be communicated rationally or is it too ethereal and abstract to even be able to express? If the former move on to the third test, if the later there needs to be some work done in the level of the first test. Or possibly if it is reexamined at the first level and found sound, then it may need some work at the second level. If it cannot be illustrated by story or picture or dialog it needs further work to find out why and to determine where the problem lies. Maybe it needs revision, maybe it needs to be abandoned, or maybe you will learn a way to express the thing.

Thirdly, is it practicable? Does it work in the real world? Can it be pulled out of the ethereal, communicated, and implemented as truth? If not then go back to test one, because most likely there is a problem there.

I often hear people think only in the third level even when it violates the first. For example, someone may argue that they have need of food therefore they have a right to the food others have to fulfill their hunger. This way of thinking quickly leads to either stealing or communism as it violates the first level and only reasons in the third level.

One would need to think in level one about whether it is right for one person to take from another person what does not belong to them or if someone has a right to what they did not work to earn. Because if stealing is wrong in the first level it is still wrong in the practical level and the need does not overcome the morality problem. But when we only think according to the third level we give no thought to ethics or truth, but to personal need and survival irrespective of truth and righteousness.

However to respond to a person’s practical need by philosophizing in the first level without a solution in the third can be just as wrong. Often people take a philosophical position and leave the person in need at the mercy of their philosophy with no practical help for them. Something only being pertinent in the first level, but having no value in the third is just as errant as something thought out only in the third with disregard to the first and second level of development.

I started this essay delineating the philosophical need for a worldview and philosophically proposed how one can test a thing before adding or retaining it in their worldview. Next, I illustrated the point with an example using the second level of the test.

Now for the practical it has to work beyond my theorizing and illustrating and can only be tested by practical use of the method for any who agree in the first and second level of thought to take it to the level of practical trial.

Starting Point

Layer upon layer

Brick upon brick

Precept upon precept

Worldviews are established

If there is an errant starting place the rest of the structure will be faulty. The house built on the sand collapses in a storm. The house built upon the rock stands firm come what may. Regardless of the foundation the building will be built even if it is not long supported. Jesus used the analogy of a house upon sand and a house upon the rock. In His parable the house built upon the rock was the person whose foundation is Christ. The house built upon the sand was the person whose faith was in something else that was not a firm foundation of truth.

What I am getting at is that our first principals, our foundational beliefs about life, anchor all that follows even if that anchor is not secure. If the Judeo-Christian God is the foundation of all truth then it logically follows that all truth flows from that reference point. This means, science, history, morality, philosophy etc. all flow from the starting point of Him. He is the bedrock in which all else is supported.

If, instead, there is no god, then all there is is the natural world: the only way we can know it is to trust our own subjective reasoning being certain of nothing including science, history, morality, philosophy etc.

Either way everything hinges on the truth of the existence or non-existence of God. If the Judeo-Christian God is real then it is logical for all knowledge to be aligned with His truth. If He is not real and there is no God than all knowledge would need to bend to that reality. Or rather would be an extension of that reality. However, I think some great bending and distorting of reason and logic is taking place to support the philosophical position of the non-existence of God. Moreover, the foundations of reason and logic collapse when God is removed from the equation.

Jacques Derrida the famous postmodern philosopher writes about how all of language is meaningless signs with no signifiers if God doesn’t exist. He says that we cannot even be certain about lingual communication for we have no anchor for language if there is no God. Ironically he authored quite a few books. In one of his books he laments reason to be the one thing he can’t get around. He knows it should not exist in a world with no God, and yet, he can’t even reason that to be the case without employing reason. Just the same logically he sees that reason is not supported any better than language if there is no God. He said it is a conundrum he couldn’t get around.

In contrast C.S. Lewis wrote in Miracles, “It is thus still an open question whether each man’s reason exists absolutely on its own or whether it is the result of some (rational) cause – in fact, of some other Reason. That other Reason might conceivably be found to depend on a third, and so on; it would not matter how far this process was carried provided you found Reason coming from Reason at each stage. It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-Reason that you must cry Halt, for, if you don’t all thought is discredited. It is therefore obvious that sooner or later you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own.”

Reason, Nature, and God

To continue on the theme of our cognitive ability to reason let us consider how it is impossible for nature to have produced reason. We use our reason in tandem with acquiring knowledge. Knowing something is distinct from what is known. Or as C.S. Lewis argues, “The knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing’s parts. In this sense something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason.” We can subdue natural emotions and physical responses by reason. A natural stimulus ought to cause a certain affect, but if we reason not to allow that affect the stimulus response can be subverted. While being a part of nature, we can still reason about nature and affect nature by reason, but nature cannot reason about itself. Nature is not rational. It has no intelligence. How can un-rational nature produce something rational like reason?

Either we accept that reason is not really reason at all and merely an instinctual non-rational response to stimulus of our environment of which we have no control or we realize that something outside of the natural world exist which is Rational and Reasonable who endowed us with the ability to reason. Hence, if you deny God’s existence, you also deny your ability to reason about the world in a rational way. You then lose your ability to rightly communicate knowledge for reason is not based on anything rational and is therefore irrational.

C. S. Lewis explains that, “It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt, for, if you don’t, all thought is discredited. It is therefore obvious that sooner or later you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own.”

Indubitably, the atheist will assert their reason and proclaim that since we have already come to the conclusion that it is impossible to argue against our ability to reason that some how evolution has transcended all logic and created in us the ability to reason about nature for it is unreasonable to believe otherwise. To that I would say that this would be a great miracle being attributed to a process of chance without being or rationality to bring it about. I think this would bring the skeptic to the unsupportable faith they accuse Christians of maintaining.

Maybe God’s existence is not so unreasonable after all. It would seem that without the Christian worldview the world lacks a standard on which to know anything for certain.

The Question of the Sufficiency of Reason

I’ve been considering the ramifications of thought processes concerning the existence of God. Skeptics ask for a reasonable logical system of evidence sufficient for proof of God’s existence from the theist who maintains He does indeed exist. Moreover, the skeptic ask that this be done using reason and evidence as a starting place without resorting to a presuppositional argument of starting at the place of the existence of the Christian God. I have been pondering the possibilities regarding this request.

How can I start at a place of reason? Has reason been proven to be a firm foundation on which to build? C.S. Lewis wrote, “If the value of our reasoning is in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning.” Doing so begs the question and gets you no where. Essentially we presuppose reasoning as a stable foundation for we cannot process thought without using reason. However, if we presuppose it as stable, where did it get its stability? We know it is not infallible: we have rules of logic to judge argument. We seem to have an intuitive idea of something being reasonable or unreasonable. Some try and operate outside of the rules of logic by claiming two contradictory things can be true at the same time, yet it is easy to show them the error of that thinking for eventually they will appeal to the same rules of logic they deny to prove their point, and, thus, disprove it.

So where does this take us? We have this reason we know exist and to a certain degree we trust reason as foundational, but yet it cannot be the standard for it is finite. It can only find stability in something infinite. If reason merely rest upon evolutionary development, reason could evolve into something entirely different than what we know today and yet in human history we do not see an increase in cognitive reasoning. If anything antiquity reasoned better than modernity or rather post-modernity. So we do not have any evidence of human reason excelling into the Nietzsche superman.

If we want to use reason as a starting place we cannot circumvent it having a foundation in the ultimate reason of God. Lewis writes, “For him [the theist] reason—the reason of God—is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her is derived. For him, the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine reason.” Thus the reason we can know anything at all is because our knowledge rest on the existence of God from where we receive the ability to reason for it is designed into our being. The ability to know cannot be divorced from the ontological point of reference of the existence of God. How can I then argue for God’s existence without first presupposing His existence so that the knowledge we discuss has a reasonable foundation on which to begin the dialog?

This does not mean that by presupposing His existence I avoid giving an answer rooted in reason, but that my answers flow from this starting point to circle back around to offer some stability for my presuppositional claim. Granted this very argument is in defense of the necessity of God’s existence, but it is not exhaustive of all knowledge on the subject.

Basically I am being asked to presuppose His non-existence and from that starting place of the supremacy of reason and knowledge prove He does exist. If my readers still maintain this request, I will need them to first establish to me a defense for the sufficiency of reason and knowledge as a starting place.

Faith and Reason

A long time ago a philosopher named Soren Kierkegaard separated faith and reason into two separate entities. He taught that you could have faith in something even if there was no reason for it because faith did not depend on reason.

Faith cannot exist apart from reason. Blind faith is no faith at all. Faith and reason have a coexistent relationship. Faith is based on reason. For example, one can say that Abraham sacrificed Isaac by faith. But the faith was based on the reason that he had experience with God. God had spoken to Him before. God's words had proven themselves true before. This was not an isolated incident where Abraham for the first time heard a voice from the sky call out and tell him to sacrifice his son and Abraham blindly obeyed this voice. No. He had walked with God already. He knew and trusted God. Yet it is still by faith because he had to trust that God was in control in order to obey and offer his son as a burnt offering. His faith was rewarded as God provided a lamb in the place of his son for the sacrifice.

Peter did not walk on water out of blind faith either. He had seen the miracles of Christ. He knew Jesus and had spent much time with him. He had reason to believe that he could do as Jesus asked and walk out on the water. He had never walked on the water before, but he took the step in faith based on prior experience that he could trust Jesus.

I think often times that people think that Christians want them to check their brains at the door to accept biblical Christianity. Some who do believe in the Bible think they do so purely on a blind faith and do not understand the evidence that exist for which their faith can be firmly anchored in reason backed up by history and empirical evidence. Yes faith is still required, but not as some would think; not as some baseless hope, but a faith rooted in truth.

God has given us so many evidences of His existence and of His love for us. The evidence for Jesus life, death, and resurrection is very strong. Even excluding the accounts of the Gospels, one can still conclude from the strong evidence that Jesus lived, preformed many miracles, died by crucifixion, and was resurrected leaving an empty tomb that cannot be explained any other way. Moreover, eyewitnesses who died for their belief in his resurrection testified to his resurrection. No one would die for a lie.

Explore the facts. Dig in. Ask questions. What have you got to lose? Seek the truth.

Being Precedes Knowing

There always seems to be this great divide between secular knowledge and the knowledge of the things of God. Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy lent itself to create a schism between faith (religious knowledge) and reason (secular knowledge). He posited that it was satisfactory for the two to contradict for the one need not be rooted in the other in a coherent fashion. Prior to this time period, philosophers searched for a unified world view to explain all of reality. They presupposed a unified reality and attempted to develop a worldview that corresponded to it. Yet Kierkegaard decided to divide knowledge into two streams avoiding the conflict altogether. Henceforth, presuppositions began to change. It was allowable for reason and science to diverge from faith and science began to be supreme over the religious world. Man became the measure of all things. Man’s reason was supreme and autonomous. Science was the discipline by which man could attain knowledge and that science was disengaged from God’s truth as man studied the world to learn about man and not to learn about God.

Eventually, man got disillusioned by the quest for reason and began to posit that it’s all meaningless. Man is no longer the measure of all things, for there is no measuring stick. There are no standards by which to measure. Postmodern philosophers such as Derrida, Focualt, and Rorty began to suggest that all of life is textual and can be analyzed linguistically and found meaningless. There is nothing to support philosophy, science, history, language. There is nothing behind it, they claim. Its support structure has been pulled out from under it because knowledge has nothing that it can rest upon to gain its meaning.

Unless, of course, God really does exist and as James Sire writes in Naming the Elephant, “we can understand the universe because an understanding God made it to be understood.” Or like John Henry Newman says, “Religious Truth is not a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.” Thus God must precede knowledge. Being must come before knowing. God must be in order for language, history, science, art, music, and life to have any purpose at all. Otherwise we are only blobs of matter, so to speak, as the evolutionist maintain. Or as the popular atheist, Richard Dawkins, laments we are merely “dancing to our DNA.”

We know deep in our souls that there is more to life than being meaningless collections of cells dancing to our DNA. We know that we have purpose as we are on a journey looking for that purpose. We value life, because God gave meaning to our lives. Our value comes from Him and all of our desires, hopes, and dreams come from Him. We can know this world around us because He has made it knowable. In Him we live, and move, and have our being.

Moreover, in Christ we find the fulfillment of all life. John 1:3 says, “Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.” He is the author of all creation and the only way to learn about that creation is through His Truth. Faith and reason are inseparable for it is all rooted in Him and when we try and divide it is when we create great errors of thinking. All of life must be measured through Him and cannot be disengaged from His Truth. It is only possible to know anything at all because God exist. He is the one we need to know in order to see all else clearly.

C.S. Lewis rightly puts it this way, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”