A worldview is a personal way of looking at the world and interpreting new information. Everybody has a worldview. According to George Barna (Think Like Jesus: Make the Right Decision Every Time, Thomas Nelson, 2003), “Your worldview is the product of all the information, ideas, and experiences you absorb to form the values, morals, and beliefs that you possess. But few people spend much time, if any, consciously examining their life lens, even though it largely defines who they are and how they behave.” Let’s look at some examples.
· Nihilism, Existentialism – There is no intrinsic meaning in the universe. Nothing meaningful exists outside the individual. Reality is meaningless, or I can create my own reality.
· Naturalism, Materialism, Atheism – The physical universe is all there is. Only space, time, matter, and energy exist. There is no spiritual realm, only what our senses can tell us.
· Pantheism (Buddhism, Hinduism) – The spiritual realm is all there is. All is one. Everyone is a god or is part of a god.
· Polytheism – Many gods exist and occasionally interact with humans. They may reside in distant locations (ancient Greek and Roman) or inhabit natural objects such as trees and animals (Native American, Shinto).
· Deism – God created the universe, but he has since abandoned it and allows the universe to run without his control or authority.
· Theism (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) – God created the universe and continues to be an active participant in it. God has all authority and control over the universe.
Some worldviews are not as easy to characterize as those listed above. The postmodern perspective is the prevailing worldview of young Americans today and is widely taught in public schools, colleges, and universities throughout the United States and Europe. Postmodern is a term of contrast which implies the existence of a modern worldview. Although before modern, there was pre-modern. These three worldviews (pre-modern, modern, and postmodern) track a shift in the personal authority of most individuals in our western society. In the pre-modern era, religion had authority and was the source of truth and reality. In the modern era, science had become the authority.
In the present, postmodern era, there is no single defining source of truth beyond the individual. In a postmodern perspective, reality is understood to be individually shaped by desire, emotion, and personal experience. In this view, there are no universal truths. Everyone has their own truth, morality, and reality. This is called relativism because truth is relative to the individual.
This is not an exhaustive summary of every worldview but demonstrates some examples of beliefs, philosophies, and viewpoints people can use to filter the barrage of information we are constantly exposed to. The ideas, language, and values of many of these viewpoints have permeated our culture and are constantly spread by entertainment, the internet, and advertising.
What difference does your worldview make? You become what you believe. Knowing we are constantly exposed to these competing views should encourage us to pause and consider what we embrace as a worldview, and how we protect our minds and hearts from the invasion of competing philosophies.
Children are still forming the “big rocks” of their worldviews. As we get older, we develop more details—the pebbles that fill in the gaps between the big rocks. No wonder children are so impressionable. Even kids that regularly go to church and Sunday school, and have started to develop their Christian worldview, can easily be influenced at school when introduced to topics such as evolution that seem to be inconsistent with their worldview. Particularly when the instructor displays a bias against “primitive” religions, like Christianity.
We often use cognitive biases to protect our worldviews. These are often reflexive, and difficult to resist even if we are aware. Social scientists refer to cognitive biases as a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments they make. Sometimes cognitive biases may be errors in thinking, but they also illustrate how our brains work.
Our brains are powerful. We are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:14 NIV). But our minds are also subject to limitations. As computers have limited processing power, limited memory, and may have incomplete input data, so do our brains. Cognitive biases are the result of mental shortcuts, sometimes called heuristics, that allow people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about their next course of action.
Some signs we may be influenced by cognitive biases include the following (from "What is Cognitive Bias?" Kendra Cherry, Very Well Mind):
· Only paying attention to news stories that confirm our opinions.
· Blaming outside factors when things do not go our way.
· Attributing other people's success to luck but taking personal credit for our own accomplishments.
· Assuming everyone else shares our opinions or beliefs.
Everybody has some cognitive bias. It is simply the way our brains are wired. A common type of cognitive bias is called confirmation bias. This is favoring information that conforms to our existing beliefs and discounting evidence that does not. Confirmation bias can make it difficult to learn new information or to appreciate someone else’s viewpoint. There are many other ways our brains can fool us. Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly, HarperCollins, 2013) lists ninety-nine different cognitive biases.
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