Part I: a historical overview of worldview comprises a paper by David Naugle, 'Worldview: history, theology, implication', and a response by Michael Stephens.
Naugle opens and closes with a quote from G K Chesterton: 'that the most practical and important thing about a person is still his view of the universe'. Naugle concurs and shows why he thinks it is the case. He draws upon his excellent book on Worldviews, but is not limited to that material.
He has some great one-liners:
Philosophy is the only unavoidable occupation (p. 12 - a view he attributes to Francis Schaeffer)
Any view of worldview, therefore, is worldview dependent. (p 14)
I submit that the notion of worldview is a valuable piece of '"Egyptian Gold." (p. 15)
Life proceeds "kardioptically," out of "a vision of the heart". (p. 16)
What a person deems to be rational or irrational appears to be a function of the reasoner's worldview (p. 22)
The great strength of this chapter is that he places the notion of worldview within the human heart: 'the biblical teaching about the heart in human life is a key to defining the notion of worldview.' It is this that sets apart the neo-calvinist approach from the misapproriation of worldview as a theoretical concept by many evangelicals. Worldview is a pre-throertical cosntruct. He has coined the term kardioptic to emphasis this point. He goes on to stress, correctly in my view the implication of worldview for rationality, understanding and epistemology. All are worldview-dependent activities.
Michael Stephens appreciates Naugle's paper and raises some important issues in his two-page response:
- How efficacious can our baptism of worldview be?
- Where does the philosophical enterprise enter in?
- Is worldview formation a task of kardia and maybe psuche but not of nous?
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