Useful Things | December 31, 2019
Welcome to the final edition of Useful Things for 2019! We hope you enjoy the two complimentary articles below from our just-released December issue of The Worldview Bulletin.
Paul Copan, Paul Gould, and I wish you a blessed and prosperous New Year in Christ Jesus our Lord!
Christopher Reese
Managing Editor
Assessing Philosophies: Five Criteria for Evaluating Worldviews
by Paul Copan
You’ve probably heard of the Reformed TULIP acrostic—Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints. Those who hold to this are commonly called “Five-Point Calvinists.”
In my forthcoming second edition of Loving Wisdom I offer another TULIP acrostic—a five-point calculus—to serve as a guide for assessing which worldview is more likely to be true: Truth, Usefulness, Logic, Integrity, and Productivity. Another way of putting it would be to ask if the worldview is factual, practical, logical, moral, and fertile.
This “calculus” isn’t some mathematical algorithm or formula guaranteed to produce a certain belief-outcome. After all, our trust is in the Lord! Yet keep in mind that all kinds of personal considerations, experiences, and judgments will be included in one’s approach to the God question (e.g., how much decisive weight we give the problem of evil and our personal experience of it). No, these criteria are a helpful, non-arbitrary guide to think through the consistency of our philosophy of life.
A little reflection reveals that these categories don’t carry equal weight. The criteria of coherence and logic are more fundamental and decisive than practicality or livability: if a worldview or story is to have a hope of being true, it must be logical and coherent—although, ideally, logic and livability would come together. Assuming a worldview is coherent, if we can’t live out that worldview, perhaps we need to rethink the truthfulness of that worldview. As world religions scholar Huston Smith suggested, we humans seem to require “eco-niches”—a grid or worldview that enables us to make sense of reality and human experience. This kind of fit makes sense if we’ve been made in God’s image: being human, we’ll seek a sense of place and meaning rather than feeling isolated and anxious—likely signs of a poor fit between our minds and reality. A good fit will be evidenced by the world’s making sense.[1]
So here is something of a working list to offer some general guidance for any worldview.
• Truth: Is it factual? Does the worldview take seriously empirical facts from history and science? On this score, the Christian faith is certainly checkable, emphasizing the importance of signs, eyewitnesses, and historical truth—things that were “not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). For example, it insists that if Jesus’s tomb was not empty, we ought to abandon the faith (1 Cor. 15:32).
• Usefulness: Is it practical? Does it take commonsense or everyday experience seriously? Can it be consistently lived out, or do the practicalities of life defy it? If I claim that the physical world is an illusion, for instance, I still must live as though it is not.Or is it like Richard Dawkins’s naturalistic Darwinism, which he admits can’t be lived out when it comes to politics, ethics, and getting along in society? One must become an anti-Darwinistic naturalist to do so.
• Logic: Is it logical? Does the worldview take reason seriously? Does it value coherence? Or is it self-contradictory—like relativism, which presumes to be absolutely true for everyone? Presumably, postmodernists who insist that “coherence” is merely a human construction will nevertheless attempt to give a coherent reason for thinking this! Or consider how the naturalist Daniel Dennett considers consciousness to be an illusion. But how can this be? To experience an illusion requires consciousness. (On the question of evil and God as inherently contradictory, the book gives significant space to this question.)
• Integrity: Is it moral? Does the worldview take seriously right and wrong as well as good and evil? Does the worldview consider Hitler’s, Stalin’s, and Mao-Tse Tung’s regimes to be evils? Or does the worldview deny the reality-status of moral truths like Torturing babies for fun is wrong? If it denies the reality of such evils as well as moral duties and virtues, they haven’t probed deeply enough into the nature of reality and their own humanity. Now a theory may claim to be “just following science,” but science can’t tell us whether humans have dignity and worth and moral obligations. That’s not the domain of science.
• Productivity: Is it fertile? Does the worldview expand our horizons to offer robust and fruitful explanations for a broad range of phenomena? Like C. S. Lewis said, does it help us to “see everything else”? Does it illuminate and make sense of key features of the universe and human experience, including our deepest longings for freedom from guilt and shame, for justice and beauty, for significance and security? Does it help address the deep moral gap between the virtuous ideal and our failure to live up to it?
Notes
[1] Huston Smith, “The Religious Significance of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder,” Faith and Philosophy 12 (July 1995): 415.
— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.
*Note: This essay is adapted from Paul Copan, Loving Wisdom: A Guide to Philosophy and Christian Faith, 2nd edition (Eerdmans, April 2020), now available for pre-order.
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(*The views and opinions expressed in the articles linked to do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of The Worldview Bulletin.)
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