Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Read Online Free Page A

philosophic thinking may think about their worldview much of the time. Others, however, may never even become aware of their own worldview, let alone ponder it.
    The worldview analyst who best captures this characteristic is Herman Dooyeweerd with his concept of religious “ground motive.” As we saw in chapter two, Dooyeweerd identifies two ground motives: “One is born of the spirit or holiness, and the other of the spirit of apostasy.” 5 That is, a ground motive is a spiritual orientation, the result of a commitment either to the living God of the Bible or to his archenemy. Dooyeweerd sees these ground motives as prior to any worldview. 6 I am, rather, incorporating his concept of ground motive into my definition of worldview . In my estimation, simply by being alive in the world, everyone makes and lives out of a religious commitment. The character of that commitment controls the entire character and direction of one’s life. This commitment is usually subconscious, but it can be made conscious by self-reflection. Worldview analysis itself can aid us in becoming more conscious of what that commitment has been, is now and may become through further reflection and decision. 7
    One philosopher who is well aware of his worldview and how it functions as a foundation for his further theorizing is John Searle. In his lucid study of consciousness, Searle is well aware that his rejection of any notion of a transcendent being is important:
    Given what we know about the details of the world . . . [e.g., matters of chemistry, physics and biology], this world view [naturalism] is not an option. It is not simply up for grabs along with a lot of competing world views. Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with convincing proof of the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in serious doubt, it is rather that in our deepest reflections we cannot take such options seriously. When we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them the comfort and security they claim to derive from these beliefs, but at bottom we remain convinced that either they have not heard the news or they are in the grip of faith. . . . And once you accept our world view the only obstacle to granting consciousness its status as a biological feature of organisms is the outmoded dualistic/materialistic assumption that the “mental” character of consciousness makes it impossible for it to be a “physical” property. 8
    What Searle does not seem to understand is, first, that his conviction that there is no god, no transcendent, is as much a matter of faith as is the conviction of a theist that there is such a god, and second, that a Christian may have evidence for this conviction that is equally valid and convincing. Harts’ The Experience of God presents in great detail why the existence of a transcendent God is far more reasonable than any case for naturalism, which he concludes is “a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond.” 9 Of course, as we saw above with Richard Dawkins, Searle is not the only scholar to rely on a plausibility structure to lend credence to an otherwise tendentious argument. 10
    Expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions. A worldview is not a story or a set of presuppositions, but it can be expressed in those ways. When I reflect on where I and the whole of the human race have come from or where my life or humanity itself is headed, my worldview is being expressed as a story. Each major worldview has its own metanarrative, its own master story.
    Naturalism, with its pattern of big bang; evolution of the cosmos; formation of the galaxies, suns and planets; the appearance of life on earth and its eventual disappearance as the universe runs down, or reconstitutes itself by way of another big bang, is a master story. So is the notion of universes that multiply endlessly, a sort of mirror image of the Hindu notion