In August 2016 I was speaking at a Christian conference in Devon, UK. I’d been given the task of saying something about the role of apologetics in the believer’s life. In my talk I touched on the need for Christian parents to train their children in cultural analysis and worldview thinking. To help my audience with this, I listed about ten worldview questions that I teach my students here in Uganda, suggesting that they could use them to teach their children to think better and ask important questions about the world.
Here are my top ten worldview questions. We could also label them the ‘inescapable questions of life’:
(1) Why does the world exist?
(2) Is there a God and if so what is He like?
(3) What is a human being?
(4) Why is the world so messed up?
(5) How can the world be fixed?
(6) What happens when we die?
(7) How can we know what is right and what is wrong?
(8) What makes a life a successful one?
(9) From where do we derive meaning and hope?
(10) Does history have any meaning and how will it end?
Asking probing questions like these helps unmask a person’s most fundamental beliefs about the world, and when we assemble the answers together we get a clear picture of a worldview. Codifying a person’s worldview has the advantage of exposing deep beliefs, often long assumed to be little more than the givens of life. When brought into the open, these beliefs can be examined, discussed and challenged.
In the end I think that there are really only four basic worldviews:
(i) Theism (God exists and created the world. Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all theistic)
(ii) Atheism (God is absent; only matter, time, energy and chance exist. Western secularism is atheistic or at least works with the assumption that God is irrelevant to modern life and fulfilment).
(iii) Pantheism (God = the world ie everything is part of the one great spiritual reality. Hinduism and Buddhism both pantheistic).
(iv) Paganism (This involves taking one or more part of the world and give it god status eg. the sun, fertility etc.)
In personal evangelism, especially amongst westerners, it can be very helpful to ask a person what their worldview is. Many will tell you that they don’t have a worldview; they just take the world as it is. If only things were so simple! In the real world, reality is highly contested and travelling cross-culturally quickly reminds us of that fact. Contemporary Western secularism is not the neutral perspective on everything, but rather a particular belief system that has emerged as generations have (too often) uncritically absorbed what numerous anti-Christian philosophers have served up onto our plates for the last 250 years.
Asking people worldview questions and explaining how we would answer them as a Christian can provide lots of scope for discussion. It also quickly exposes the silliness that there is only one way to understand reality and has the added bonus of reminding the person we’re talking to, that Christians can have an intelligent approach to understanding life!
But back to my talk in Devon. The morning after I’d spoken, I met a lady on the campsite who told me that she’d gone back to her tent and put each of my ten questions to her sixteen year old son. To her great dismay – she explained – he’d answered each one of them differently to her. As we chatted it became apparent that her answers were Christian and her son’s secular, or at least he worked with the assumption that God was virtually irrelevant to his life. She said something like this to me, “How can it be that raising my son in a Christian home has had virtually no impact on his worldview, whilst his schooling, peer group and cultural exposure has been so effective in shaping his world and life view?”
My encounter with that disappointed mother reminded me again that we who are Christian parents need to develop in our children a Christian mind and teach them the delight that comes from knowing the God who is really there. We have to do all we can to prevent our children from following the path of the prodigal son, travelling far from the Father’s house, settling for pig food as their life-diet instead of the riches of Christ. Of course we must teach our children the Scriptures but part of teaching them the Bible is to demonstrate that the Bible addresses and answers the great questions of life. As we do this we will be helping our children to think worldviewishly and along the way contrast the Christian worldview with its major rivals.
Perhaps the greatest failure of the church in the West has been the tendency to neglect to train the minds of God’s people; too many have acquired a kind of divided-life spirituality which assumes that the gospel only addresses a ‘spiritual’ realm of life: prayer, church activities, evangelism etc. Thinking is somehow seen as unspiritual and too intellectual. Along the way we’ve forgotten that The Fall has profoundly affected the whole of human existence and that is especially true of the mind. One of the consequences of sin is that we instinctively develop a mind-set where God is not central to reality. Realising this, the need to redeem the mind to believe God’s truth rather than the world’s falsehood quickly becomes inescapable. With our children, it just won’t do to tell them to accept Jesus into their hearts. Of course our children need to receive Christ as their Saviour, but we also need to show them why it makes sense to do so. In other words we need to give our children solid reasons why the Christian faith is true (nothing else explains reality as we find it) and contrast it with the inability of other worldviews to make sense of the world.
Now please don’t think that here I am suggesting that we Christian parents should be in the business of brainwashing our children; far from it. But the power of the secular project to capture our children is so great (every film, television show and advertisement leaves the secular scent behind) that we need a mount a massive counter-offensive. Who can doubt the success of western societies in making belief in God seem so abnormal and unbelief so normal?
Accordingly we parents need to be hugely intentional about equipping our children to know what they believe and why they believe what they believe. It seems to me a tragedy that we lose so many children to a thoroughly secular way of life when secularism has no satisfying answers for the most basic questions we all face: is there a good God who cares about me? (no, He’s just a myth); why am I here? (just an accident); who am I? (highly evolved pond slime); what happens when I die? (you become extinct and end up as food for worms); where can I find real hope in the midst of pain? (you can’t really, suffering has no final purpose). These are some of the harsh realities of the secular mind- set. Secularism is not a creed worth getting the flags out for as the new-atheists like Richard Dawkins would have us believe. Christianity by contrast does have intellectually satisfying answers to the deepest questions of life and our children need to see that before they enter university where they can expect to have much of their childhood faith challenged or worst, mocked.
My eldest child is now 12 (how the years fly and the need to make each day count so vital!), and in my commitment to teaching him to be a worldview thinker I’ve produced a worksheet which he has to complete after finishing a book, watching a film or reading an article from a newspaper. It requires him to deduce the worldview that is promoted or assumed by the book/film/article by answering 15 questions. I’ve added the 15 questions to the bottom of this post in the hope that it might be some use to other parents. For those interested in a one page PDF or Word version, please send me an email and I’ll send you a copy.
For Christian parents with access to the internet, may I suggest that you sit down with your teenager(s) once a week and observe the best Christian apologists in action as they answer the questions of sceptics. A good place to begin would be watching Cliffe Knechtle’s videos at https://givemeananswer.org/?page_id=14. Not only will you see the Gospel defended well, but you’ll also get a feel for the kind of issues that sceptics repeatedly bring up; issues that your children will have to think about for themselves living in the cultural climate of the early 21st Century. There’ll also see that you don’t have to throw away your mind to be a Christian; the truth of the gospel can more than hold its own in the marketplace of ideas. After watching Cliffe Knechtle, try Ravi Zacharias, Tim Keller and John Lennox (all easy to find on YouTube). All are excellent defenders of the Christian faith.
And finally, not very long ago I was reading my children a short biography of one of the greatest missionaries of the modern age, Hudson Taylor. In the early pages it describes how he used to get angry with his father because he insisted that his son stay indoors and study with him rather than be allowed to play out with his friends. His father refused to allow his son to settle for the mediocre existence common amongst boys brought up in Barnsley at that time. But as life unfolded and Taylor looked back, he realised that during those years he acquired not only a profound understanding of the Bible and church history, but he also learned to think and communicate well orally and on paper. It was to stand him in excellent stead for his life’s work of taking the Gospel to China. The story reminded me that Christian parents must adopt a radically counter-cultural approach to their children’s upbringing, especially during their teenage years. Those years are not to be thought of as a time to whittle away the leisure hours glued to the Play Station or hanging about the town with peers. Instead they are years for serious study, training in righteousness and thoughtful preparation for university, careers and marriage. In the years to come living as a faithful Bible-believing Christian is going to become hard. We need to start now to prepare the next generation to remain faithful, praying that they will in time take their places as pillars in the Church of Jesus Christ.
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What’s the Worldview?
Name of book/film/article/song………………………………………………………………………………………..
What is the worldview position (explicitly or implicitly) assumed or promoted?
NB Tick all that apply.
(1) What exists?
(a) Only material matter, energy, time and chance (no God, no heaven or hell, no angels etc.)
(b) God plus created material matter
(c) Everything is ‘spiritual’ or ‘divine’
(2) If God exists, what kind of God is He?
(a) Relevant
(b) Irrelevant
(c) Creator
(d) Personal
(e) Impersonal
(f) A speaking God
(g) Our Judge
(3) Why is the world here?
(a) Exists by pure chance
(b) Created by God
(c) Always been
(4) What is a human being?
(a) Creature of chance/highly evolved animal
(b) Creature made in God’s image
(c) No “individuality” – human beings part of the undifferentiated soul of the cosmos
(5) What’s wrong with the world?
(a) The fit survive and the weak get crushed
(b) A lack of Education
(c) Poverty
(d) Inequalities and Power Differentials
(e) Sin/alienation from God
(f) Religion
(6) How can the world be fixed/improved?
(a) Abandon religion
(b) Increase equality
(c) Give a voice to the powerless
(d) Bringing the whole of the creation under the Lordship of Jesus Christ
(e) Universal submission to Allah
(7) What happens to human beings at death?
(a) Extinction stated or assumed
(b) Cycle of reincarnation
(c) Judgement followed by heaven or hell
(d) All enter heaven
(e) Other
(8) What constitutes a successful life?
(a) Individual self-expression – following one’s heart and dreams
(b) Turning in repentance and faith to God who gives grace to those unable to help themselves
(c) Maximise pleasure through consuming goods and services
(d) Achieving good karma
(9) Where does meaning and pleasure come from?
(a) Knowing the Infinite-Personal God
(b) Living for one’s self alone
(c) Making a difference in the world
(d) There is no final meaning
(e) The consumption of goods and services
(10) Where do we get right and wrong from?
(a) The Infinite-Personal God revealed in Scripture
(b) Accumulated human wisdom
(c) The majority opinion
(d) Our own personal wisdom alone
(11) Perspective on religion in general?
(a) Harmful
(b) Silly
(c) All roads lead to God
(d) Truth found in Jesus Christ
(12) What about truth?
(a) Everyone’s truth is equally valid
(b) Truth comes through education
(c) Truth found in Christ
(d) Truth revealed to the prophet Mohammed
(e) Truth and falsehood both illusionary
(13) What’s the perspective on human sexuality?
(a) Fluid and determined by personal preference
(b) Sexuality celebrated as creation of God
(c) Men and women interchangeable
(d) Sexuality unrelated to marriage
(14) What makes the heroes, heroes?
(a) They’re free spirits and break the prevailing conventions
(b) They uphold Judeo-Christian morality
(c) They maximise sex, money and power
(15) Perspective on Authority?
(a) Authority derived from Yahweh
(b) Suspicion of all authority
(c) We are each our own authority
(d) Authority established by the will of Allah
Conclusion
Do we have:
(a) Theism (what type)? (b) Pantheism (what type)? (c) Atheism (what type? (d) Paganism (what type)?
Comments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
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First published on Challenging Thinking on 2018-03-24. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.