thank you so many of you are aware that
we’re living in an unsettled times in
many societies throughout the world we
have a feeling that there’s increased
polarization on the political level and
this is particularly true in the United
States where I come from where you may
be aware that the long-simmering culture
Wars of the last 20 years
threatened to boil over under the
current president now when people try to
come up with a reason for why this
polarization is taking place you more
and more will hear the argument that at
the root
there are really two embittered
worldviews that are engaged in a
struggle on the one hand secular
liberalism and on the other conservative
or religious conservatism so I want to
talk to you tonight about worldview this
is a very versatile term it’s a term
that is creeping up more and more in the
media what makes it so unusual I think
is that it’s able to convey both
scientific rational understanding
religious belief and political passion
all three of those at the same time it
seems that there’s no other term that is
quite as adequate for describing both
confrontations with radical Islamism and
also struggles within the United States
between Republicans and Democrats so I
do want to talk about worldview but I’ll
let you know straight off that I’m quite
suspicious of the term worldview I think
that if I posed the question what’s in a
worldview my first answer would be
hidden assumptions and what I want to
explore with you tonight are what are
the the hidden assumptions that have
been deposited in worldview over the
course of its 200 year history so I’m
going to take a brief journey through
the history of worldview and try to
uncover some of these assumptions with
the aim not that you will come away with
feeling I now know what my worldview is
but rather I want you to question the
very idea of worldview that’s my aim
I want to offer you two particular
points of entry into this topic on the
one hand I want to explore the ways in
which secular and religious actors have
contributed to the invention of
worldview but also have propelled its
development over time and I think what’s
interesting is that there are also
hidden dialogues that go on between
religious and secular actors through the
term worldview the second thing that I
want to talk to you about is the merger
of politics and worldview if we talk
about rise and fall of worldview we can
say that under national socialism there
is a rise of worldview in the twentieth
century and that in the United States of
the Cold War
there’s the fall of worldview and now
that we’re renters
a rise of worldview the question is what
does the history tell us or how can I
help us the first point we have to talk
about is the origin of worldview now
worldview is not a concept that has
already always existed I want you not to
assume that just because it makes
intuitive sense to us that we have a
worldview right everyone sees the world
in a certain way but the the idea of
worldview is it was invented in the
nineteenth century and it was invented
in Germany and it comes from the term
vet uncial now two things occurred in
Germany at that time to give rise to
worldview the first thing was a
revolution in Natural Science we heard
earlier about the Scientific Revolution
of the Renaissance but what happens in
the nineteenth century in Germany is
that a group of natural scientists
believed that it is possible to give a
total description of the world
from a few basic principles and here we
see alexander von humboldt a german
explorer and naturalist who writes a
book called cosmos which is an attempt
really at a first rough draft of this
total history of the world through
natural science and
one of the key elements of this
worldview is the notion of evolution so
already before Darwin that Germans had
it latched on to the idea of evolution
and evolution provides a total model for
all human life it all it derives and
emerges and and develops further through
evolution the evolutionary process and
here we see the Tree of Life from a
German author from the mid 19th century
essentially it shows the totality of
biological life in a single diagram that
is world view and this is a worldview
author the second thing that happens is
that this total understanding of the
world gets mobilized against religion
what happens is that the advocates of
this new natural scientific worldview
argue that it has replaced the old world
view of Christianity in the process of
replacing Christianity advocates of the
new world view believe that it takes on
also the attributes previously held by
Christianity it provides a morality it
provides an explanation of where we come
from and where we’re going and it
provides meaning for life and here we
see a painting of a revolutionary of
1848 robert bloom he was an advocate of
the new world view also it engaged in
the revolution and here he’s about to be
executed for his his participation in
the revolution and you’ll notice he’s
raised up his hand against the Catholic
priest he himself was a Catholic my
background but he had now converted to
the new world view and the message is I
don’t need Christianity I’m secure in my
secular worldview even at the moment of
death okay
so natural scientific worldview is
essentially the first dominant worldview
in Germany now if you look online at a
online bookseller you will find if you
type in worldview into the title search
you will come up with something like a
thousand titles maybe maybe more
of those the majority are written by
advocates of religious worldview in
other words they were still propagating
worldview as something they want to
aspire to and that we should follow and
within that group that by far the most
numerous are advocates of what is known
as Christian worldview now Christian
worldview authors are largely white
evangelicals from the United States so
that’s an interesting fact how is it
that a term originating in secularism is
now most actively propagated by the most
conservative branch of Protestantism in
the United States to understand that
transition we’ll have to go back to the
period around 1900 and we now get a
Dutch element to our story
there’s a famous anthology in’ and
politician abraham calper he said that
the enemy had a vast army and that it
had lined up a formation of fearsome
formation on the battle line it had
science universities political parties
they were all united by worldview what
christians needed was to match
one-for-one the battle formation of the
enemy and calper founded a university
and they needed to unite it with what
with worldview so he became an advocate
of Christian worldview in the year 1900
around then now this is a picture I
believe from the United States calper
was very influential in American circles
Protestant circles particularly
fundamentalists and they took CalPERS
idea of Christian worldview and
developed out of it a very intelligent
defense of the Bible what they said was
that in the past Christians used to try
to defend the Bible when attacked by
non-believers on a kind of one by one
basis they would if the non-believer
would argue about miracles Christians
would argue about miracles you know
creation in seven days right people that
have knowledge of geology and so on
would say haha can’t possibly be true
therefore the Bible is not true so the
argument from worldview was the
important thing when reading the Bible
is your mindset with which you read it
if you’re a Christian you are reading
essentially a different Bible than the
non-believer
so that’s worldview right the Christian
worldview gives you different
presuppositions and necessarily leads to
different conclusions you see a
different reality so the argument is
that secular and Christian worldviews
cannot communicate with one another they
are they are separate and they must
remain separate in the interest of
Christianity okay so that’s Christian
worldview now what’s interesting to sum
up my first point tonight is that we see
that secular worldview is only possible
out of a critique of religion but that
Christian worldview or religion
worldview in general if you use the term
worldview is really derived from
secularism okay in some of its key
assumptions obviously not in its
theology so that that’s quite an
interesting fact there there’s a mutual
dependence if you so will on both of
these understandings of worldview as
revealed in history and I think actually
there’s some hope in a contemporary
culture wars for some type of dialogue
on that basis alright now we come to our
second point which is the merger of
politics and worldview in the 20th
century
oops okay so here here is an image of
American famous evangelical I think this
is Billy Graham as a representative of
the American embrace of Christian
worldview now when we talk about
political worldview we need to mention
Adolf Hitler because National Socialism
was in many way the absolute high point
of the development of worldview Hitler
never spoke or rarely spoke of national
socialism as a philosophy or an ideology
but always as a vet on shown as a
worldview and he made an interesting
innovation in the thinking about
worldview in the process he said that
the other people who talk about
worldview the Christians and the
secularists they make a mistake
they always derive their idea of
worldview from the truth okay they
believe that truth is what makes
worldview great Hitler said no what
makes worldview great is its ability to
unite the nation so the test of the
worldview as an ideal is its ability to
unite the nation against its enemies and
for Hitler that was communists and Jews
so Hitler looks back in history and said
when was Germany last united by a
worldview properly
he said medieval Christianity the
medieval church managed it but then the
Reformation came along separated
Protestants from Catholics and world and
religion from that point on became what
divided Germans rather than United them
so Hitler said if Germany is going to be
reunited it has to be reunited under a
secular worldview one that can fight
Marxism and that’s what he offered as
National Socialism so we can say that
the rise of worldview the zenith of
worldview is national socialism the
Second World War in many ways is a war
of worldviews right certainly as far as
as Marxism and national socialism are
concerned but what if the third party to
the conflict in Europe right what about
the liberal democracies the United
States and the UK do they have a
worldview right is liberal democracy a
worldview it’s an important question
especially today now at the end of the
at the end of the cold or the sorry at
the beginning of the Cold War there were
a group of American and European liberal
intellectuals who pondered this question
and they said that the answer is no
liberal democracy does not have a
worldview moreover the lack of a
worldview in liberal democracy is what
makes liberal democracies superior to
all the other political systems so the
what they said was that America in
particular had a specific intellectual
tradition which had on the one hand
pluralism and on the other pragmatism so
what that meant in the political realm
was that you would have a multitude of
voices pluralism but they had to then
engage in some kind of dialogue or
debate or a scientific investigation to
arrive at pragmatic solutions to
pragmatic understandings of truth at the
end and they argued that that was the
very antithesis of worldview right
worldview is a total system of
explanation pragmatism pluralism are the
antithesis they were so confident of
their position that in the year 1960 a
book was published called the end of
ideology and it also clearly refers to
the end of world view so they believed
worldview was over in 1960 okay and
here’s an image of I don’t know what
this is I’m gonna guess hungry 1956
toppling a statue of Stalin but in a
sense the sense of these Cold War
liberals was that they had toppled those
worldviews okay
what is this teach us about America
today okay I’m American I’m focusing on
the United States here but I think
that’s where these debates about world
your most intense at present so what is
the lesson of this historical tour for
today in the United States now one of
the things similar to the notion of
Christian worldview that world views are
separate and not supposed to mesh not
supposed to arrive at some kind of
common ground it’s not far from there to
go to alternative facts now you may be
aware of this statement that was made by
the press the the spokeswoman of Trump
in January of this year
that Trump was offering alternative
facts on in some dispute now alternative
facts of course got a laugh at the time
and some people were very irritated at
this but it does make sense from the
point of view of worldview all right
because world views have alternative
facts because they have alternative
realities
the other place we could look and say
world view thinking is at work is the
debate over climate change many
conservatives who reject climate change
in the United States are not looking to
engage in a serious scientific debate
over climate change but rather insist on
the importance of the validity of their
perspective right which is again
worldview thinking at work so to
conclude I think that there’s a point to
be made by people that think with
worldviews that the liberal press or
liberals in general are sometimes a bit
blind to their own ideological position
and they tend to assume that their
position is shared by everybody okay
that is a good valid criticism however
when you start to talk in terms of
worldview dialogue tends to end and I do
believe following the Cold War liberals
that worldview talk is bad for democracy
because why
well the Cold War liberals said that
pluralism is good but you can’t it’s not
the endpoint it’s not enough to just say
there are two sides to every issue you
have to also connect pluralism to some
kind of pragmatic search for a solution
to problems or for some type of
compromise and to my thinking whenever a
worldview is invoked dialogue ends and
and for that reason I want you to be my
my suggestion that before you use
worldview the next time you stop to
consider the assumptions that go along
with that term and the key assumption I
believe is that thought that worldviews
cannot engage in dialogue right but but
my belief or my hope is that we can
engage in dialogue and I think that that
is what is needed at the current moment
thank you
we’re living in an unsettled times in
many societies throughout the world we
have a feeling that there’s increased
polarization on the political level and
this is particularly true in the United
States where I come from where you may
be aware that the long-simmering culture
Wars of the last 20 years
threatened to boil over under the
current president now when people try to
come up with a reason for why this
polarization is taking place you more
and more will hear the argument that at
the root
there are really two embittered
worldviews that are engaged in a
struggle on the one hand secular
liberalism and on the other conservative
or religious conservatism so I want to
talk to you tonight about worldview this
is a very versatile term it’s a term
that is creeping up more and more in the
media what makes it so unusual I think
is that it’s able to convey both
scientific rational understanding
religious belief and political passion
all three of those at the same time it
seems that there’s no other term that is
quite as adequate for describing both
confrontations with radical Islamism and
also struggles within the United States
between Republicans and Democrats so I
do want to talk about worldview but I’ll
let you know straight off that I’m quite
suspicious of the term worldview I think
that if I posed the question what’s in a
worldview my first answer would be
hidden assumptions and what I want to
explore with you tonight are what are
the the hidden assumptions that have
been deposited in worldview over the
course of its 200 year history so I’m
going to take a brief journey through
the history of worldview and try to
uncover some of these assumptions with
the aim not that you will come away with
feeling I now know what my worldview is
but rather I want you to question the
very idea of worldview that’s my aim
I want to offer you two particular
points of entry into this topic on the
one hand I want to explore the ways in
which secular and religious actors have
contributed to the invention of
worldview but also have propelled its
development over time and I think what’s
interesting is that there are also
hidden dialogues that go on between
religious and secular actors through the
term worldview the second thing that I
want to talk to you about is the merger
of politics and worldview if we talk
about rise and fall of worldview we can
say that under national socialism there
is a rise of worldview in the twentieth
century and that in the United States of
the Cold War
there’s the fall of worldview and now
that we’re renters
a rise of worldview the question is what
does the history tell us or how can I
help us the first point we have to talk
about is the origin of worldview now
worldview is not a concept that has
already always existed I want you not to
assume that just because it makes
intuitive sense to us that we have a
worldview right everyone sees the world
in a certain way but the the idea of
worldview is it was invented in the
nineteenth century and it was invented
in Germany and it comes from the term
vet uncial now two things occurred in
Germany at that time to give rise to
worldview the first thing was a
revolution in Natural Science we heard
earlier about the Scientific Revolution
of the Renaissance but what happens in
the nineteenth century in Germany is
that a group of natural scientists
believed that it is possible to give a
total description of the world
from a few basic principles and here we
see alexander von humboldt a german
explorer and naturalist who writes a
book called cosmos which is an attempt
really at a first rough draft of this
total history of the world through
natural science and
one of the key elements of this
worldview is the notion of evolution so
already before Darwin that Germans had
it latched on to the idea of evolution
and evolution provides a total model for
all human life it all it derives and
emerges and and develops further through
evolution the evolutionary process and
here we see the Tree of Life from a
German author from the mid 19th century
essentially it shows the totality of
biological life in a single diagram that
is world view and this is a worldview
author the second thing that happens is
that this total understanding of the
world gets mobilized against religion
what happens is that the advocates of
this new natural scientific worldview
argue that it has replaced the old world
view of Christianity in the process of
replacing Christianity advocates of the
new world view believe that it takes on
also the attributes previously held by
Christianity it provides a morality it
provides an explanation of where we come
from and where we’re going and it
provides meaning for life and here we
see a painting of a revolutionary of
1848 robert bloom he was an advocate of
the new world view also it engaged in
the revolution and here he’s about to be
executed for his his participation in
the revolution and you’ll notice he’s
raised up his hand against the Catholic
priest he himself was a Catholic my
background but he had now converted to
the new world view and the message is I
don’t need Christianity I’m secure in my
secular worldview even at the moment of
death okay
so natural scientific worldview is
essentially the first dominant worldview
in Germany now if you look online at a
online bookseller you will find if you
type in worldview into the title search
you will come up with something like a
thousand titles maybe maybe more
of those the majority are written by
advocates of religious worldview in
other words they were still propagating
worldview as something they want to
aspire to and that we should follow and
within that group that by far the most
numerous are advocates of what is known
as Christian worldview now Christian
worldview authors are largely white
evangelicals from the United States so
that’s an interesting fact how is it
that a term originating in secularism is
now most actively propagated by the most
conservative branch of Protestantism in
the United States to understand that
transition we’ll have to go back to the
period around 1900 and we now get a
Dutch element to our story
there’s a famous anthology in’ and
politician abraham calper he said that
the enemy had a vast army and that it
had lined up a formation of fearsome
formation on the battle line it had
science universities political parties
they were all united by worldview what
christians needed was to match
one-for-one the battle formation of the
enemy and calper founded a university
and they needed to unite it with what
with worldview so he became an advocate
of Christian worldview in the year 1900
around then now this is a picture I
believe from the United States calper
was very influential in American circles
Protestant circles particularly
fundamentalists and they took CalPERS
idea of Christian worldview and
developed out of it a very intelligent
defense of the Bible what they said was
that in the past Christians used to try
to defend the Bible when attacked by
non-believers on a kind of one by one
basis they would if the non-believer
would argue about miracles Christians
would argue about miracles you know
creation in seven days right people that
have knowledge of geology and so on
would say haha can’t possibly be true
therefore the Bible is not true so the
argument from worldview was the
important thing when reading the Bible
is your mindset with which you read it
if you’re a Christian you are reading
essentially a different Bible than the
non-believer
so that’s worldview right the Christian
worldview gives you different
presuppositions and necessarily leads to
different conclusions you see a
different reality so the argument is
that secular and Christian worldviews
cannot communicate with one another they
are they are separate and they must
remain separate in the interest of
Christianity okay so that’s Christian
worldview now what’s interesting to sum
up my first point tonight is that we see
that secular worldview is only possible
out of a critique of religion but that
Christian worldview or religion
worldview in general if you use the term
worldview is really derived from
secularism okay in some of its key
assumptions obviously not in its
theology so that that’s quite an
interesting fact there there’s a mutual
dependence if you so will on both of
these understandings of worldview as
revealed in history and I think actually
there’s some hope in a contemporary
culture wars for some type of dialogue
on that basis alright now we come to our
second point which is the merger of
politics and worldview in the 20th
century
oops okay so here here is an image of
American famous evangelical I think this
is Billy Graham as a representative of
the American embrace of Christian
worldview now when we talk about
political worldview we need to mention
Adolf Hitler because National Socialism
was in many way the absolute high point
of the development of worldview Hitler
never spoke or rarely spoke of national
socialism as a philosophy or an ideology
but always as a vet on shown as a
worldview and he made an interesting
innovation in the thinking about
worldview in the process he said that
the other people who talk about
worldview the Christians and the
secularists they make a mistake
they always derive their idea of
worldview from the truth okay they
believe that truth is what makes
worldview great Hitler said no what
makes worldview great is its ability to
unite the nation so the test of the
worldview as an ideal is its ability to
unite the nation against its enemies and
for Hitler that was communists and Jews
so Hitler looks back in history and said
when was Germany last united by a
worldview properly
he said medieval Christianity the
medieval church managed it but then the
Reformation came along separated
Protestants from Catholics and world and
religion from that point on became what
divided Germans rather than United them
so Hitler said if Germany is going to be
reunited it has to be reunited under a
secular worldview one that can fight
Marxism and that’s what he offered as
National Socialism so we can say that
the rise of worldview the zenith of
worldview is national socialism the
Second World War in many ways is a war
of worldviews right certainly as far as
as Marxism and national socialism are
concerned but what if the third party to
the conflict in Europe right what about
the liberal democracies the United
States and the UK do they have a
worldview right is liberal democracy a
worldview it’s an important question
especially today now at the end of the
at the end of the cold or the sorry at
the beginning of the Cold War there were
a group of American and European liberal
intellectuals who pondered this question
and they said that the answer is no
liberal democracy does not have a
worldview moreover the lack of a
worldview in liberal democracy is what
makes liberal democracies superior to
all the other political systems so the
what they said was that America in
particular had a specific intellectual
tradition which had on the one hand
pluralism and on the other pragmatism so
what that meant in the political realm
was that you would have a multitude of
voices pluralism but they had to then
engage in some kind of dialogue or
debate or a scientific investigation to
arrive at pragmatic solutions to
pragmatic understandings of truth at the
end and they argued that that was the
very antithesis of worldview right
worldview is a total system of
explanation pragmatism pluralism are the
antithesis they were so confident of
their position that in the year 1960 a
book was published called the end of
ideology and it also clearly refers to
the end of world view so they believed
worldview was over in 1960 okay and
here’s an image of I don’t know what
this is I’m gonna guess hungry 1956
toppling a statue of Stalin but in a
sense the sense of these Cold War
liberals was that they had toppled those
worldviews okay
what is this teach us about America
today okay I’m American I’m focusing on
the United States here but I think
that’s where these debates about world
your most intense at present so what is
the lesson of this historical tour for
today in the United States now one of
the things similar to the notion of
Christian worldview that world views are
separate and not supposed to mesh not
supposed to arrive at some kind of
common ground it’s not far from there to
go to alternative facts now you may be
aware of this statement that was made by
the press the the spokeswoman of Trump
in January of this year
that Trump was offering alternative
facts on in some dispute now alternative
facts of course got a laugh at the time
and some people were very irritated at
this but it does make sense from the
point of view of worldview all right
because world views have alternative
facts because they have alternative
realities
the other place we could look and say
world view thinking is at work is the
debate over climate change many
conservatives who reject climate change
in the United States are not looking to
engage in a serious scientific debate
over climate change but rather insist on
the importance of the validity of their
perspective right which is again
worldview thinking at work so to
conclude I think that there’s a point to
be made by people that think with
worldviews that the liberal press or
liberals in general are sometimes a bit
blind to their own ideological position
and they tend to assume that their
position is shared by everybody okay
that is a good valid criticism however
when you start to talk in terms of
worldview dialogue tends to end and I do
believe following the Cold War liberals
that worldview talk is bad for democracy
because why
well the Cold War liberals said that
pluralism is good but you can’t it’s not
the endpoint it’s not enough to just say
there are two sides to every issue you
have to also connect pluralism to some
kind of pragmatic search for a solution
to problems or for some type of
compromise and to my thinking whenever a
worldview is invoked dialogue ends and
and for that reason I want you to be my
my suggestion that before you use
worldview the next time you stop to
consider the assumptions that go along
with that term and the key assumption I
believe is that thought that worldviews
cannot engage in dialogue right but but
my belief or my hope is that we can
engage in dialogue and I think that that
is what is needed at the current moment
thank you
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