Graduate 128: Does God have a worldview?
I've come to the conclusion (tentatively) that I don't update my blog more regularly, not for lack of things to write about or lack of time for writing, but because of lack of time for posting. As implausible as that might seem, I find that while I may take the time here or there to write or muse about something, finding the time to post is extremely difficult. One reason for that is the fact that I do not have Internet access in my home. The only time that I regularly have Internet access is when I am on the UC Riverside campus; and that's when I'm doing work or conducting research or writing papers. My Internet use, at those times, is driven by the desire to get some piece of information and get back to work--far from leisurely and not conducive to blogging or posting blogs. Another reason is that blog-posting, for me, at least, is a process unto itself--quite apart from writing the posts. That's because I regularly modify the type face in my writing to include bold-face and italics. Those modifications do not automatically transfer from my word processor to the blog text window, so I have to manually reinsert them.
So I'm not sure how long after I write this it will actually get posted. Maybe it will be a week or two; we'll see. Anyhow, this question (i.e. the title question) has been rolling around in my head for several weeks and I figured that a good way to (maybe) get it out of there would be to write about it. This post came together very quickly and I have not edited it for grammar, readability, organization, or structure. Note also that this is being posted while my views on the topics have not been fully formed. If I say anything heinously wrong, let me know and I'll modify my view accordingly. This post is not my attempt to say the final word on the subject. Take it for what it's worth. Here it is.
--
Does God have a worldview? This question was posed to me by a friend at church. How would you answer it?
My initial answer was: Yes.
Are you surprised?
I have since decided (as if it were up to me) that God does not have a worldview and I would like to explain some of the thought process that led me to that conclusion.
Oftentimes, when speaking of worldviews, the metaphor of 'glasses' or 'lenses' comes up. Worldviews, it is said, are the lenses through which we see the world. Depending on the kind and shape and tinting of the glasses, the world will show up differently. In fact, we have a phrase--"looking at the world through rose-colored glasses"--that employs this very idea. To a person wearing "rose-colored glasses" the world appears rosy, happy, good--perhaps, to a greater degree than it, in fact, is. Worldviews operate at all levels of human cognition. They affect how we think about ourselves, reality as a whole, relationships, morality, God--everything. They are constituted by the various ideas that we possess and beliefs that we hold. They are the map (another metaphor commonly employed in connection with this theme) by which we orient ourselves and other objects in the world. When presented with situations, words, circumstances, actions, events, questions, surprises, etc. we interpret them and think about them and process them and make sense of them by bringing them into dialogue with our established worldview.
Here's a really simple illustration of a worldview and how it can affect our outlook on the world. A person who was raised in an atheistic home and taught that all events in the world can be explained by the laws of physics will bring those ideas to bear when confronting the world and interpreting people and events that he encounters throughout his life. If he hears about a person who, against incredible odds, recovered from a fatal and terminal strain of cancer, his worldview will tend to rule out, for him, the possibility that such an event was the result of divine or miraculous intervention. He will not interpret that person's recovery as a divine act because his worldview has conditioned him to interpret all events only through the laws of physics. Now if enough "highly improbable" recoveries happen, say, in a very short period of time and are highly correlated to incidents of religious communities praying for the affected persons, that person may see fit to change his worldview, but for the most part, worldviews operate by conditioning and interpreting how we see the world.
Now consider the question: Does God have a worldview? What are we to make of it? Does God have a way of interpreting the world? Does he see the world through a set of "lenses" that condition what and how he sees it? Most Christians, I suspect, would say: No, God does not have a worldview. What they mean by this is that God's understanding and knowledge of the world is NOT mediated by some intervening interpretive framework. Instead, God just sees and understands and knows how the world is.
Notice the opposition: On the one hand there is how we see the world and on the other hand there is how the world (actually) is. The thought is, usually, that human beings have a way of seeing the world that may or may not be in line with how the world actually is. We experience this often enough. Sometimes the way we think the world is bumps up against how things actually are. E.g. Larry thought that Sue was really attracted to him but, in fact, she was not; he interpreted certain of her actions as expressing an interest in him, but was mistaken; he discovered this when he tried to kiss her and she slapped him in the face. In other cases, we can become aware of the contingency of our worldviews just by the realization that other people see the world differently. E.g. In some parts of the world, insects form a regular part of a human diet. In other parts of the world, eating bugs is thought to be very disgusting and strange.
By contrast, God is never in the position of seeing the world in any way other than how it actually is. God is never in the position of bumping up against reality by virtue of a mistake or of discovering that something that He thinks is offensive or wrong is actually not.
In the end, I have come to the conclusion that this view of God is basically correct. God, as creator, is in a unique position to understand the essences of things in the world and of the events that unfold in it. His understanding is not mediated by some contingent, interpretive framework. HOWEVER, I think, that is not the end of the story.
Why, you may ask, did I begin by saying that God did have a worldview? The reason is, that I have an objection to the opposition that I described above, between how we see the world (or how the world seems to be) and how the world (actually) is. My thought was, initially, that if I say that God has a worldview, then that will undermine this objectionable opposition by conferring a kind of legitimacy on worldviews. I now have decided that it is not necessary that God have a worldview for this opposition to be effectively undermined. So, my conclusion is: (1) God does not have a worldview and (2) the tendency to place in opposition how we see the world and how the world is is fundamentally flawed.
Now it may not be clear to everyone how these two concepts are "opposed" so let me elaborate a bit. I think there is a tendency to connect how the world is to some concept of reality. Makes sense, right? How the world "actually" is; how the world "really" is; what is real; what is "reality". The problem is that how we see the world, because it is contrasted with reality takes on a certain sense of unreality. Indeed, there are many Christians who are seriously worried that if, prompted by certain philosophical and cultural movements, we lose the idea of there being, fundamentally, a way the world is, then all we will be left with is these various unreal perspectives. Such views are commonly designated anti-realist.
I can understand the worry being presented here and the consequent preoccupation with discovering how the world "really" is. But is that really where we should be putting our focus? One of the problems with worldview talk is that the more we emphasize worldviews, the harder it seems to be to stay in touch with actual reality. We are constantly faced with this problem: how do we know whether our way of seeing the world actually lines up with the way the world actually is? Another way of putting the question: is it possible to get around the glasses to see the world directly? If we reject the idea that there are worldviews, then we seem to fly in the face of very clear and obvious evidence that people often do see the world in different ways and not always in ways where there is a clear right and wrong. (Recall the insect example.) But if we acknowledge that we see the world through lenses, then how can we know that we're actually in line with reality.
This is, I think, a very interesting philosophical question that I would like to continue to pursue in the long-term. I don't have really solid answers as yet, but I would like to make a few suggestions. My main point, for now, is this: we need to get away from this opposition between the way the world (actually) is and the way the world seems to be. We need to get away from the idea that our worldviews represent these interpreting lenses through which we see the world and we need to realize and appreciate that those very interpretive lenses are part of the world. Notice, that when we use worldview language, we often invoke this image of us standing at a certain point with the world somewhere in front of us and our worldview lenses in between. On this picture, both we and our lenses are seen as somehow separate from the world that we are looking at and evaluating. That picture, I think, is wrong. We are part of the world and our lenses are part of the world. In what sense are we and these lenses a part of this world? Here's one illustration to help make clearer what I have in mind.
In ethical discourse, there is one very influential school of thought that tends to draw a distinction between facts and values. So for instance, consider a situation in which one person kills another person. According to this way of thinking, there are, on the one hand, the facts of the situation: the one person pulled the trigger which ignited the gunpowder and propelled the bullet toward the other person's chest where it penetrated and punctured the heart, causing severe bleeding and death. Those are the facts, on the one hand. On the other hand are the value judgments that could be made on this event: was the killing murder? was it manslaughter? was it self-defense? was it authorized by a government order, as in war-time? was it authorized by a government order, as in war-time, in accordance with principles of just war? In a time and place where dueling is acceptable, the killing might not be interpreted as a murder. In a time and place where dueling is illegal, the killing might be interpreted as a murder. But the upshot of this view is that whether or not the killing counts as a murder has nothing to do with the actual facts of the case but relies upon an interpretation--usually the interpretation of the society-at-large (i.e. the laws).
Here, as in the case of worldviews, described above, there seems to be a reality/unreality distinction. The facts are thought to be real and the interpretation is thought to be, to some extent, unreal--or at least it is not as "real" as the facts. Now, many Christians would agree that this kind of view of morals and ethics is unacceptable. Most of them would argue that whether or not a particular act counts as murder amounts to an objective fact. Whether or not we are in the position to determine whether it was a murder is a different question; but whether or not the act was a murder remains a fact nonetheless.
I am intrigued by the idea (suggestion) that where worldviews are concerned, we need to come to appreciate a similar point. Now these cases do not amount to exact parallels. So we must be careful. But I am suspicious that our tendency to speak of worldviews as interpretations confers on them a kind of unreality that they do not, in fact possess. I will leave until another time a further defense of this point. What I would now like to turn to is a piece of biblical evidence for the point that I am making.
The following Scripture passage struck me in a new way after some study in philosophy of language. For just that reason, I am a bit skeptical of the very interpretation that I am about to put forward. I worry that my study in philosophy may be tainting my reading of Scripture. Still, I would like to be open to, at least, considering the point that I am about to make; perhaps my study of philosophy is illuminating my reading of Scripture.
The passage I have in mind comes from the Genesis creation account.
Genesis 1:26-28
"Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
Genesis 2:19-20
"And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him."
Notice what Genesis 2:19-20 does NOT say: "And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man so that He could tell him what each was called and make sure that he got all the names right."
God did not name the animals. That task was given to man: "and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name." That's quite a gift--quite a lot of power and authority that has been conferred on man. God did not tell Adam the way it is or direct Adam to discover what the real names of the animals were. Instead, he granted Adam the authority to name the animals. And I think that "naming" and "interpreting" are closely related. I think this passage is pointing to the reality of interpretation. Interpretation is not unreal. Interpretation is not something that is separate from the world or the way the world really is. Rather, interpretation shapes reality in very "real" ways.
Now, does admitting this mean that there is no such thing as the way the world really is? I don't think so. Does it mean that man's ability to interpret and reinterpret the world is boundless or unlimited? I don't think so. Notice: "but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him." What counted as a "suitable helper" for Adam was not completely up to Adam. He was not in the position to look at a female gorilla and say, "I will call you Woman." Had he done so, I expect, God would have stepped in and said, "Um, Adam, that's not going to work." Humans have a powerful, but not unlimited, ability to interpret the world. Just as we have powerful, but not unlimited, creative abilities. We share in God's image in our ability to create and to shape matter and produce new things in the world; but we cannot create, like God, ex nihilo. Likewise, though, I believe, we are free to interpret the world in all sorts of ways, that authority is not boundless or unlimited.
What does this mean? It means that some people can be okay with eating bugs and some people can be not okay with eating bugs and there not be a contradiction--not because those are (unreal) "value judgments" but because they reflect the real abilities of people to shape the reality around them. If one were to ask God, "Is it normal or not normal to eat bugs?" he would not answer, "Yes," or "No."
What else does this mean? I fear that it does not mean that we will have an easier time working out where that dividing line is between what holds for all people in all places at all times and what is open to interpretation. We will still face that challenging question. However, the view I am proposing, I think, has the advantage of situating the discussion solidly in the realm of what is real and really the case--whereas, in traditional worldview discourse, I fear, we find ourselves in the awkward position of working with these putative "unrealities."
I think this view gives us a new way of understanding what it means to be created in the image of God and of the great power and authority and glory with which God has invested humanity.
What I have tried to do is take the question, "Does God have a worldview?" as a launching point for thinking about worldviews in general. Again, I have come to the conclusion that God does not have a worldview, but the reason that I initially thought that he might and the point that I have tried to emphasize is that I want us to take seriously that worldviews are more than just "interpretations of the world" (understood as somehow abstracted from the world, not a part of that world, and unreal) but reflect our God-given ability to shape the world around us.
--
Post scripts: This view of worldviews also does not change the fact that we are capable of bumping into reality or of finding reality to be quite contrary to our expectations and beliefs. Again, our ability to shape the world is not unlimited. (Larry cannot make Sue be attracted to him just by believing it to be so.)
One of the big questions that stays with us is how we can be properly sensitized to the way the world is. How can we know that our interpretations of the world are appropriate given the way those things actually are, even if our interpretations go beyond just the way things are. These are Heideggerian questions, I think.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
So I'm not sure how long after I write this it will actually get posted. Maybe it will be a week or two; we'll see. Anyhow, this question (i.e. the title question) has been rolling around in my head for several weeks and I figured that a good way to (maybe) get it out of there would be to write about it. This post came together very quickly and I have not edited it for grammar, readability, organization, or structure. Note also that this is being posted while my views on the topics have not been fully formed. If I say anything heinously wrong, let me know and I'll modify my view accordingly. This post is not my attempt to say the final word on the subject. Take it for what it's worth. Here it is.
--
Does God have a worldview? This question was posed to me by a friend at church. How would you answer it?
My initial answer was: Yes.
Are you surprised?
I have since decided (as if it were up to me) that God does not have a worldview and I would like to explain some of the thought process that led me to that conclusion.
Oftentimes, when speaking of worldviews, the metaphor of 'glasses' or 'lenses' comes up. Worldviews, it is said, are the lenses through which we see the world. Depending on the kind and shape and tinting of the glasses, the world will show up differently. In fact, we have a phrase--"looking at the world through rose-colored glasses"--that employs this very idea. To a person wearing "rose-colored glasses" the world appears rosy, happy, good--perhaps, to a greater degree than it, in fact, is. Worldviews operate at all levels of human cognition. They affect how we think about ourselves, reality as a whole, relationships, morality, God--everything. They are constituted by the various ideas that we possess and beliefs that we hold. They are the map (another metaphor commonly employed in connection with this theme) by which we orient ourselves and other objects in the world. When presented with situations, words, circumstances, actions, events, questions, surprises, etc. we interpret them and think about them and process them and make sense of them by bringing them into dialogue with our established worldview.
Here's a really simple illustration of a worldview and how it can affect our outlook on the world. A person who was raised in an atheistic home and taught that all events in the world can be explained by the laws of physics will bring those ideas to bear when confronting the world and interpreting people and events that he encounters throughout his life. If he hears about a person who, against incredible odds, recovered from a fatal and terminal strain of cancer, his worldview will tend to rule out, for him, the possibility that such an event was the result of divine or miraculous intervention. He will not interpret that person's recovery as a divine act because his worldview has conditioned him to interpret all events only through the laws of physics. Now if enough "highly improbable" recoveries happen, say, in a very short period of time and are highly correlated to incidents of religious communities praying for the affected persons, that person may see fit to change his worldview, but for the most part, worldviews operate by conditioning and interpreting how we see the world.
Now consider the question: Does God have a worldview? What are we to make of it? Does God have a way of interpreting the world? Does he see the world through a set of "lenses" that condition what and how he sees it? Most Christians, I suspect, would say: No, God does not have a worldview. What they mean by this is that God's understanding and knowledge of the world is NOT mediated by some intervening interpretive framework. Instead, God just sees and understands and knows how the world is.
Notice the opposition: On the one hand there is how we see the world and on the other hand there is how the world (actually) is. The thought is, usually, that human beings have a way of seeing the world that may or may not be in line with how the world actually is. We experience this often enough. Sometimes the way we think the world is bumps up against how things actually are. E.g. Larry thought that Sue was really attracted to him but, in fact, she was not; he interpreted certain of her actions as expressing an interest in him, but was mistaken; he discovered this when he tried to kiss her and she slapped him in the face. In other cases, we can become aware of the contingency of our worldviews just by the realization that other people see the world differently. E.g. In some parts of the world, insects form a regular part of a human diet. In other parts of the world, eating bugs is thought to be very disgusting and strange.
By contrast, God is never in the position of seeing the world in any way other than how it actually is. God is never in the position of bumping up against reality by virtue of a mistake or of discovering that something that He thinks is offensive or wrong is actually not.
In the end, I have come to the conclusion that this view of God is basically correct. God, as creator, is in a unique position to understand the essences of things in the world and of the events that unfold in it. His understanding is not mediated by some contingent, interpretive framework. HOWEVER, I think, that is not the end of the story.
Why, you may ask, did I begin by saying that God did have a worldview? The reason is, that I have an objection to the opposition that I described above, between how we see the world (or how the world seems to be) and how the world (actually) is. My thought was, initially, that if I say that God has a worldview, then that will undermine this objectionable opposition by conferring a kind of legitimacy on worldviews. I now have decided that it is not necessary that God have a worldview for this opposition to be effectively undermined. So, my conclusion is: (1) God does not have a worldview and (2) the tendency to place in opposition how we see the world and how the world is is fundamentally flawed.
Now it may not be clear to everyone how these two concepts are "opposed" so let me elaborate a bit. I think there is a tendency to connect how the world is to some concept of reality. Makes sense, right? How the world "actually" is; how the world "really" is; what is real; what is "reality". The problem is that how we see the world, because it is contrasted with reality takes on a certain sense of unreality. Indeed, there are many Christians who are seriously worried that if, prompted by certain philosophical and cultural movements, we lose the idea of there being, fundamentally, a way the world is, then all we will be left with is these various unreal perspectives. Such views are commonly designated anti-realist.
I can understand the worry being presented here and the consequent preoccupation with discovering how the world "really" is. But is that really where we should be putting our focus? One of the problems with worldview talk is that the more we emphasize worldviews, the harder it seems to be to stay in touch with actual reality. We are constantly faced with this problem: how do we know whether our way of seeing the world actually lines up with the way the world actually is? Another way of putting the question: is it possible to get around the glasses to see the world directly? If we reject the idea that there are worldviews, then we seem to fly in the face of very clear and obvious evidence that people often do see the world in different ways and not always in ways where there is a clear right and wrong. (Recall the insect example.) But if we acknowledge that we see the world through lenses, then how can we know that we're actually in line with reality.
This is, I think, a very interesting philosophical question that I would like to continue to pursue in the long-term. I don't have really solid answers as yet, but I would like to make a few suggestions. My main point, for now, is this: we need to get away from this opposition between the way the world (actually) is and the way the world seems to be. We need to get away from the idea that our worldviews represent these interpreting lenses through which we see the world and we need to realize and appreciate that those very interpretive lenses are part of the world. Notice, that when we use worldview language, we often invoke this image of us standing at a certain point with the world somewhere in front of us and our worldview lenses in between. On this picture, both we and our lenses are seen as somehow separate from the world that we are looking at and evaluating. That picture, I think, is wrong. We are part of the world and our lenses are part of the world. In what sense are we and these lenses a part of this world? Here's one illustration to help make clearer what I have in mind.
In ethical discourse, there is one very influential school of thought that tends to draw a distinction between facts and values. So for instance, consider a situation in which one person kills another person. According to this way of thinking, there are, on the one hand, the facts of the situation: the one person pulled the trigger which ignited the gunpowder and propelled the bullet toward the other person's chest where it penetrated and punctured the heart, causing severe bleeding and death. Those are the facts, on the one hand. On the other hand are the value judgments that could be made on this event: was the killing murder? was it manslaughter? was it self-defense? was it authorized by a government order, as in war-time? was it authorized by a government order, as in war-time, in accordance with principles of just war? In a time and place where dueling is acceptable, the killing might not be interpreted as a murder. In a time and place where dueling is illegal, the killing might be interpreted as a murder. But the upshot of this view is that whether or not the killing counts as a murder has nothing to do with the actual facts of the case but relies upon an interpretation--usually the interpretation of the society-at-large (i.e. the laws).
Here, as in the case of worldviews, described above, there seems to be a reality/unreality distinction. The facts are thought to be real and the interpretation is thought to be, to some extent, unreal--or at least it is not as "real" as the facts. Now, many Christians would agree that this kind of view of morals and ethics is unacceptable. Most of them would argue that whether or not a particular act counts as murder amounts to an objective fact. Whether or not we are in the position to determine whether it was a murder is a different question; but whether or not the act was a murder remains a fact nonetheless.
I am intrigued by the idea (suggestion) that where worldviews are concerned, we need to come to appreciate a similar point. Now these cases do not amount to exact parallels. So we must be careful. But I am suspicious that our tendency to speak of worldviews as interpretations confers on them a kind of unreality that they do not, in fact possess. I will leave until another time a further defense of this point. What I would now like to turn to is a piece of biblical evidence for the point that I am making.
The following Scripture passage struck me in a new way after some study in philosophy of language. For just that reason, I am a bit skeptical of the very interpretation that I am about to put forward. I worry that my study in philosophy may be tainting my reading of Scripture. Still, I would like to be open to, at least, considering the point that I am about to make; perhaps my study of philosophy is illuminating my reading of Scripture.
The passage I have in mind comes from the Genesis creation account.
Genesis 1:26-28
"Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
Genesis 2:19-20
"And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him."
Notice what Genesis 2:19-20 does NOT say: "And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man so that He could tell him what each was called and make sure that he got all the names right."
God did not name the animals. That task was given to man: "and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name." That's quite a gift--quite a lot of power and authority that has been conferred on man. God did not tell Adam the way it is or direct Adam to discover what the real names of the animals were. Instead, he granted Adam the authority to name the animals. And I think that "naming" and "interpreting" are closely related. I think this passage is pointing to the reality of interpretation. Interpretation is not unreal. Interpretation is not something that is separate from the world or the way the world really is. Rather, interpretation shapes reality in very "real" ways.
Now, does admitting this mean that there is no such thing as the way the world really is? I don't think so. Does it mean that man's ability to interpret and reinterpret the world is boundless or unlimited? I don't think so. Notice: "but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him." What counted as a "suitable helper" for Adam was not completely up to Adam. He was not in the position to look at a female gorilla and say, "I will call you Woman." Had he done so, I expect, God would have stepped in and said, "Um, Adam, that's not going to work." Humans have a powerful, but not unlimited, ability to interpret the world. Just as we have powerful, but not unlimited, creative abilities. We share in God's image in our ability to create and to shape matter and produce new things in the world; but we cannot create, like God, ex nihilo. Likewise, though, I believe, we are free to interpret the world in all sorts of ways, that authority is not boundless or unlimited.
What does this mean? It means that some people can be okay with eating bugs and some people can be not okay with eating bugs and there not be a contradiction--not because those are (unreal) "value judgments" but because they reflect the real abilities of people to shape the reality around them. If one were to ask God, "Is it normal or not normal to eat bugs?" he would not answer, "Yes," or "No."
What else does this mean? I fear that it does not mean that we will have an easier time working out where that dividing line is between what holds for all people in all places at all times and what is open to interpretation. We will still face that challenging question. However, the view I am proposing, I think, has the advantage of situating the discussion solidly in the realm of what is real and really the case--whereas, in traditional worldview discourse, I fear, we find ourselves in the awkward position of working with these putative "unrealities."
I think this view gives us a new way of understanding what it means to be created in the image of God and of the great power and authority and glory with which God has invested humanity.
What I have tried to do is take the question, "Does God have a worldview?" as a launching point for thinking about worldviews in general. Again, I have come to the conclusion that God does not have a worldview, but the reason that I initially thought that he might and the point that I have tried to emphasize is that I want us to take seriously that worldviews are more than just "interpretations of the world" (understood as somehow abstracted from the world, not a part of that world, and unreal) but reflect our God-given ability to shape the world around us.
--
Post scripts: This view of worldviews also does not change the fact that we are capable of bumping into reality or of finding reality to be quite contrary to our expectations and beliefs. Again, our ability to shape the world is not unlimited. (Larry cannot make Sue be attracted to him just by believing it to be so.)
One of the big questions that stays with us is how we can be properly sensitized to the way the world is. How can we know that our interpretations of the world are appropriate given the way those things actually are, even if our interpretations go beyond just the way things are. These are Heideggerian questions, I think.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
posted by Metaphysician_delta | 11:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home