This is session two of the class on apologetics and world religions. And today we're going to be talking about the idea of worldviews and we'll also talk about the worldview which is known as secularism or modernism or some people would use secular humanism so what will happen is we'll first talk about what a worldview is and again just in general worldview is like a system of thought it's the deepest assumptions about reality which we'll go into then we'll talk about a specifically secular society which is basically people that will use words like secularism modernism naturalism skepticism it's basically people that believe that God doesn't exist or that God is distant and uninvolved in the world so people that are from this perspective might be fine with people that believe in some faith as long as that faith is privatized and has no voice in the public square. Another common term would be the idea of exclusive humanism.
You may have heard that if you've read people like Charles Taylor. Now, finally, we'll talk about common objections to the faith that are raised by people within the secular worldview, and that'll be taught by Brian Behnken. So to begin, let's talk about what is a worldview. Now a worldview you is basically people's deepest assumptions about reality. It's how they view the world.
And those assumptions are typically so deep and so ingrained and so implanted from their youth, from their culture, that they don't even know they're seeing the world through a certain lens, through a certain bias. They just assume that's just the way it is. So it's like if you are wearing a pair of glasses, you can't see the glasses.
You can only see through the glasses, and the glasses shape how you see the world. That's the basic idea and let me just use a few examples imagine that I started to cough and hack and fall on the floor people from Most Western countries who see the world from a very secular worldview would assume I was having some physical problem Maybe I had asthma I was asthmatic Maybe I was having a heart attack, but what would happen if I did that let's say in a primitive tribe They might assume I'm being attacked by a spirit So again, we see the same data but that lens strongly shapes how we interpret that data. Or an example would be, let's imagine you pray for someone, and they're healed of cancer.
From a Christian perspective, that would show the power of Jesus Christ, him authenticating the truth of Christianity. But if you were, let's say, again, from a tribal background, you might assume it was a local spirit. Or if you're an atheist, you might assume it was just psychosomatic. Or perhaps if they're...
a bit more unusual. They might believe it was you're an alien or you had psychic powers. So again, same data, different interpretation.
Or the last example is imagine you're looking at the human body. Now for a Christian, you'd say, what an incredible picture of God's creation, God's brilliance in designing our human body. But if you're an atheist, you think, what an amazing picture of the power of natural selection and mutations to create the appearance of design.
Again, so that's important. These lenses shape the way people are. And what's also important to realize is they're not just ideas.
Because one good critique of the idea of worldview is it's too academic. It's just ideas. Really, another description would be a frame or a frame of reference, which deals with our entire narrative experience of reality.
It's our traditions. It's our culture. It's our heroes.
It's the media we watch. It's our experiences. It's how we react emotionally to different ideas.
So again, a frame or a frame of reference or a narrative, a large-scale narrative, is perhaps an even better way to think about it because that's just dealing with the totality of human existence. And when Brian Behnken talks about world religions, he'll use the language of frames, which includes both the worldview and the entire human experience in that narrative they're living. So that's what it is.
Now it's important because what happens is these false worldviews, these philosophies of the age will blind people from the truth. Let me use an example. Why this is important. Let's imagine that someone from India comes, they're Hindu, and they say, you've got to stop eating meat because if you don't stop eating meat, you will build up karma and you'll be reincarnated as a lower being. Now, for most of us, that would make absolutely no sense.
Like, what's karma? Is it like having a bad hair day? What's reincarnation? What's wrong with eating meat?
So because we don't... come from that Eastern perspective, that would make no sense. But it's the same thing for a person that hears us talk about we need to be saved by grace, by the blood of the Lamb, and we're under God's wrath.
If you're an atheist, that just makes absolutely no sense. And again, let me use another example. Let's imagine you go to a party and you notice someone walks into the bathroom. And what happens is they don't come out for an hour. You open the door, knocking first, and there's a plant there which has the same coloration as their clothes.
And somebody comes up and says, my goodness, that person turned into a plant. And you think, that's crazy. And then they say, well, look, you have the evidence of the empty bathroom. There's no way that you could have, that person could have left.
What were they going to do, go down the drain pipe? We had eyewitnesses of the empty bathroom. But they would say people don't turn into plants. That's stupid. It's the same thing.
If you talk to an atheist about the evidence of the resurrection, you have the empty tomb, you've got the eyewitnesses, you've got the appearances. And for a Christian who is open to that possibility, it makes perfect sense. But for an atheist who believes it's just impossible for someone to rise from the dead, they'll simply blow off what you're saying because their world view, their lens, prevents them from accepting the truth that you have. So what you have to do is you have to go into their narrative, their worldview, disrupt it, help them break them free, help them to step into your worldview with your lens, and then the evidence for the resurrection makes sense. That's why this is really, really essential in evangelism.
Oh, and it's also important in ministry, because so often people that become Christian will still see the world through a secular lens. The operating system of their mind is still thoroughly secular, even though they think consciously they're Christian. It's kind of like you never go across the country border and you know how your phone you take out one SIM chip and put in another? That's the way many Christians are. They go to church, they put in their Christian SIM chip, they praise God, they leave church, they pull out their Christian chip, put in their secular chip, and they go about their life, their family, their entertainment as if God didn't exist.
Completely schizophrenic. So you have to help people fully enter into the Christian narrative. Fully embrace the true Christian frame including the Christian worldview, which is more the ideas. So again, this is why it's so important. Now the structure of any worldview can be described very often by an act, a narrative, where it starts with creation.
Where do we come from? What's human nature? Why do we exist? What's our purpose?
Then the idea of the fall, like why is the world such a mess? Most people realize the world's a mess. Why is that?
And then how do you fix the world? What's the purpose of fixing the world? And finally, where are we all headed? And I talked about that in the Christian narrative, but it's helpful to know what their narrative is and how they answer those questions, so you know what you're dealing with.
So that's the basic structure of a worldview. You'd also ask questions like, again, what is human nature? What's your understanding of time? Like in the West, we have a very linear idea of time, so we're always looking to the future.
If you're in, let's say, a tribal country, they're looking to the past. That's why they value ancestors. So again, the idea of time, the idea of space, the idea of value, all these things are important.
So the more you understand that, the better off you will be. And again, as I mentioned before, what happens is you want to invite a person to step out of their worldview, step into your worldview, put on your lens, and see the world from your perspective. And again, you're acting as a servant, so you're inviting them to do that. You're not coercing them. So that's generally an important aspect.
So part two is we're going to be talking about now The development of the secular worldview. And again, secular just means society where people assume God doesn't exist or that God is simply uninvolved, uninvolved in the world. That's secular. And again, as I mentioned, modern is a very common way to describe that.
The early secular worldview was described as modernity. And what happened is the rise of modernity or the rise of the secular worldview was basically a lot due to the failure of the church. What happened is the church became corrupt. There was abuses, things like indulgences. People complain about hypocrisy in the church today, and obviously that's really a problem.
The boy back then, they did it en masse. It was pretty incredible. Also what happened is you had holy wars.
You had Protestants and Catholics who killed each other, Protestants killing other Protestants. In addition, you have the rise of science. So you have people like Isaac Newton that explain the universe in terms of these mechanistic processes.
And people began to think maybe we can explain everything according to mechanistic processes. You have people that saw technology as the savior of the world. So back in the Middle Ages, if you had bad vision, what would you do? You might go to a priest to pray for you.
What do we do today if we've got bad vision? We go to an eye doctor. We go to an optometrist. So it seems like what people looked to God to in the past could be dealt with technology, with reason, with science. So more and more people said, do we even need God?
Let's get rid of all this nonsense. And they started to reconstruct society from the perspective that God didn't exist or he was uninvolved. And then religion became something that was compartmentalized. There was sort of this break between the private, the subjective, the personal, and the public, the true, and the objective.
That's very classic in the secular perspective. So people say it's fine if you're religious, but as long as you keep it to yourself and it's private. But that is definitely not the picture of the Christian faith. So that's basically the idea of secularism. And what happened again is the story changed.
It's the same basic story, but different actors. We're not created by God. We were created by the blind forces of nature in the secular worldview.
We just evolved through time, through chance, time, mutations, and so forth. What happens is the problems in the world aren't from a broken relationship with God. They're due to ignorance and superstition. So the religious people are the problem.
Ignorance is the problem. You don't fix the world through returning in a relationship to God. You fix the world through science, through technology, through reason, through the free market system, through a better economy, through education.
Now doesn't that resonate with political speeches? How do we fix the problems of our country? We need better education, we need more social programs, we need etc. etc. better technology. So again, you see the secular worldview permeates our culture, we don't even know it.
Very rarely will they say, well, the real problem in our culture is we're in rebellion against God, we need to repent, we need to be more generous, we need to stop cheating our spouses. You don't hear that so much from a political podium, because they don't see the world from that perspective. And what's the final end?
Well, in modernity, With the modern worldview, it's a utopia of peace, prosperity, with lots of technology. It's like the old Star Trek episodes. Remember the old Star Trek episodes?
Everything in the Federation was great. Yes, they had problems from the Romulans and the Klingons, but those were typically outside of their culture. That's the example of modernity.
We're headed towards a utopia of peace and prosperity, and without religion. That's the idea of the modern narrative. Now, what happened is the secular narrative change somewhat because what happened is different people had different takes on it like communism had the same basic story with different actors the problem of the world is essentially the fact that we've got a class society where the Where the business class suppresses the workers salvation is through a rebellion or a revolution Where we become a classless society and then the final end is this classless society without private property where you enter utopia So again, it's the same story But it just has different characters.
Again, that's classic with modernity. What happened is people became very disenfranchised, because people realized the same technology that brought us medicine brought us nerve gas and machine guns. People realized that the people that were claiming to have the truth, claiming to act rationally, remember reason was very of highest importance, were using that language to control people. Like what happened is most scientists Back in the early 1900s, late 1800s, said we have proven that white Europeans are superior to other ethnic groups.
In fact, even in the Bronx they had a zoo where they put people from Africa because they felt that they were lower evolved examples of humanity. Now even they had IQ tests that were culturally biased to convince people that were minorities that they were less intelligent than white Europeans. So again, people started to realize that people were using the language of truth to oppress people. In fact, how many quote-unquote scientific studies of how, let's say, eating this food is really healthy for you, you eventually find out those studies were sponsored by the people that sell that food.
So again, there was a suspicion of the language of reason. There was suspicion of the language of truth because people were using it and abusing it. There's also the recognition that we all see the world through biases, through grids.
So no one believed that anyone could be truly objective. There was no truth per se, but everyone had their own truth based on their own experience. And that's really key when you get into post-modernity, because what you have is every community has to create their own truth.
That's why you have, let's say, gender politics, or you have gay politics, or you have this politics. Because there is no objective politics, it's just a matter of each local community using their power to gain more of what they want at the expense of other tribes. That's sort of the danger of post-modernity.
It's very fragmentary. It's also based not so much on reason, but feeling and experience. So it's not so much what do you think, it's what do you feel is more of the value system of post-modernity. And that shows itself in different ways.
So what does that make? What does that do to religion? So under modernity you have the idea of moral therapeutic deism. That religion is fine as long as you realize that it's only about teaching basic morality, it's deistic and that God is very distant.
It's therapeutic because religion is all about making you feel better. And in post-modernity the idea is that every religious system is fine. Intolerance is the highest value because you have to create your own truth.
And what happens is it's very corrosive because religion becomes a commodity. So what you have is there's all these religious options in this buffet you can kind of mix and match. So religion is something that makes you feel better, but it has no power to speak to injustice.
It has no power to speak to cruelty or to lies and deception, because there is no objective value of truth. You also see it in things like medicine. In the modern worldview, what happens is people would treat the human body like a car. If you have a broken limb, you fix it. If you've got...
and you need a new organ, you replace it. But that's very myopic, because what you find is so much disease is associated with unforgiveness, it's associated with not living out God's commands. It's very much a disconnected relationship with God.
So from the Christian perspective, health isn't— I mean, all that's great with medicine and with doctors, but it's not complete. You also have to recognize health is connected to our relationship with God. It's connected to how we live out God's commands.
Sin is very unhealthy. So again, often in the Western tradition, it can be very myopic because they do things that are good, but they're not sufficient to bring true health. But then in the more postmodern tradition, what you have is people that may go into alternative medicine.
And a lot of alternative medicine can be quite good, but also some of it can be kind of inaccurate, like using magnets to heal you or psychic touch. But because postmodernity doesn't value reason or logic or science as much, people embrace ideas even if there's no support for them. And what you find is in every area of society, you can view how business, for instance, is not done properly if it's done from a secular worldview.
So in business, the secular idea is that you're there to make money, that people are human resources. Don't you love that term, human resources? It's like they're furniture. The idea is that the ethic is pragmatic.
It's what you can get away with very often. Well, the Christian perspective of business is that business is a stewardship from God to steward creation. So being a business owner is a very godly thing, but you do it to serve society.
You want to empower the people that work under you. You want to use their gifts. You want to have products that are healthy.
So again, you see this very clear picture of how the secular worldview can erode and corrupt economics, business, medicine, while a Christian worldview, when you apply it properly, can bring restoration to every area of society. Which is one of the most powerful apologetics.