It is a simple question with big implications. A worldview is how you see the world. It is the filter that allows each individual to look at the world around him and make sense of it. Your worldview is that set of assumptions that is the basis for your interpretation of reality.

Do you ever wonder why intelligent, rational people reach such radically different conclusions about the world around us based on the same evidence? Worldview is the answer. How you interpret the world, the conclusions you reach about what goes on around you, is dependent on your worldview. If your worldview is different from mine, you will see the world differently from me. If your worldview is radically different from mine, your conclusions about the world will be radically different from mine.

The importance of worldview can’t be over stated. The problem is, most people have, at best, an incoherent worldview. That is, it is self contradictory. They pick up a little here, a little there and end up with a hodge podge of ideas and filters. Instead of a well thought out, reasoned worldview, they have a series of emotional reactions based on things they’ve picked up here and there.

The most basic example is the question of truth. The church teaches there is something called truth that is universal. It is true for everyone, everywhere, at all times. The common position in the world, however, is that truth is relative. What is true for you may not be true for me. Many people find themselves saying they believe in absolute truth but when presented with specific situations begin to back away from that position. For example, the Bible teaches that stealing is wrong and most Christians would readily agree that it is wrong. But ask them if it is okay for a parent who is destitute to steal food to feed her children and many will quickly say yes. In their minds the need of the child overrides the wrongness of stealing. But how can that be the case if it is true that stealing is wrong? The answer is, it can’t. If the question, is stealing wrong, has a conditional answer then that answer isn’t absolute truth and you don’t really believe it is even though you say you do.

This same situation occurs with thousands of different questions every day in our lives. Most of the time it is not nearly so stark as the hypothetical above but it is no less real. Most of us hold these incoherent views that cannot be reconciled without changing something in our belief system.

It is common today for people to believe in relativism. In fact, the question of stealing above stems from relativism. Whether stealing is wrong or not is relative. That is, it all depends. But most of us would consistently say that stealing is wrong when the thief is stealing from us! So not only do conflicting beliefs enter the picture, how it affects us personally is also an issue.

In college a I took Introduction to Philosophy. The professor started off telling us that most of us had an incoherent philosophy. His primary goal for the class was to push us to recognize what our philosophy was and how it was self contradictory so that we could arrive at a coherent philosophy. He was really talking about worldview and my goal here is similar to his. I want to explore our various worldviews and how they affect our interpretation of the world. But I want to go farther and see how our worldviews are incoherent, how that affects how we interpret events around us and how we can arrive at a consistent, coherent worldview that actually takes all of reality into account.

If your worldview doesn’t give you the tools to interpret and deal with what we actually experience in our lives it is, at best, incomplete. For most of it is both incoherent and incomplete. I propose that a complete, coherent worldview will improve your life because it will allow you to make sense of the world around you. Surely that is worth pursuing.