Life is too short, and the stakes are too high
to be casual about our fundamental assumptions...
"What lies beyond the realm of what I can prove?"
"How do I know?"
To these assumptions we entrust our deepest hopes.
These assumptions
form the basis of our worldview - the meta-story in which we are living. We all have one, whether we're conscious of it or not. It has 3 parts:
- a set of meta-physical assumptions (ontology)
- relating to the lens through which we interpret life (epistemology)
- and resulting in a set of ethics (axiology).
Some worldviews say we came from nothing and will end in nothing. Others say that our ultimate destiny is semi-wakeful anonymity. Most often we are unconscious of the worldview we hold and never examine it, resulting in a life filled with inconsistencies.
Here is an example of the significant role our worldview assumptions play...
Harvard geneticist Dr. Richard Lewontin, in the New York Review of Books says,
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
But it's more than an intellectual exercise...
Our worldview is more than facts we assume, it is the orientation of our deepest heart commitments... commitments that we may not even be aware of. Ultimately our worldview is the answer each of us would give if we were asked about our ultimate source of life and happiness.Come and see...
Don't you want live your life based on what is real?
Don't you want to know what you believe and why?
This site is designed to help.
Finding your way around
The content in this site is organized as meta-story.
You can navigate progressively through the menus, or use the search icon to look for something specific.
The content is adapted from a set of documents created by over 100 spiritual leaders who together tried to summarize the worldview of a Christ-follower. Those documents are: A statement of beliefs (called a 'confession') & two Q&A documents ('catechisms'), one large and one small. Some questions in one are also addressed by another. In these cases, they are listed together.
Scripture references will popup if you hover over them, and clicking on them will open in biblia.com.