How To Come Up With A Worldview

(Mostly taken from a Ravi Zacharias lecture, then later expanded upon later.)

I. Starting Points and Assumptions

II. The Groundwork to Testing the Truth

III. Four Questions in Worldviews - The BIG Ones

IV. Five Tests to Establish Truth

V. Six Elements You Must Bring to Bear On 4 Questions

A. Starting Points & Assumptions

1. Something exists.
2. All people have absolutes.
3. Two contradictory statements cannot both be right. (Law of non-contradiction.)
4. All people exercise faith. (St. Augustine - before people can know anything they have to believe something.)
5. Some truths are absolute, some are relative.  Avoid extremes (problems!) on either side.
6. Proofs are person relative even though a truth might be absolute. What might be cogent for one person might not be for another person.
7. On questions like the existence of God, rarely is it an intellectual problem holding a person back from faith.  Almost always it is an issue of will (autonomy / pride / arrogance -> aka me) or passions (lust / greed / fear etc.)

B. The Groundwork To Testing The Truth

1. Induction - Leading to something, arguing from the particular to the general.(ie. the scientific method, historical evidence.)
2. Deduction - Leading from something, arguing from the general to the particular (conclusion follows necessarily from the stated premises.)(reason, philosophy)
3. Truth - A property of assertions that corresponds to the real world.
4. Correspondance Theory of Truth - Arrive at truth by seeing if the statementmade corresponds to reality.
5. Coherance Theory of Truth - Where it is not possible to check the referrentwhere a series of propositions are given and if they all cohere in the ultimatededuction you can safely say that it is distinctly possible that truth affirmationsare being made.

C. Questions in Worldviews

Every worldview answers four questions, ultimately they are questions we all ask, whether conciously or unconciously.

1. Origin
2. Meaning
3. Morality
4. Destinity

With these questions some of the referrants can be checked via correspondance.  You then see if the system ultimately coheres together.

D. Five Tests To Establish Truth

* Important * No one test alone can comprehensibly address the four questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny.

1. Logical Consistency (Rational thinking)
2. Empirical Adequacy (Empiricism)
3. Experiential Relevance (Experience)
4. Unnafirmability Test for Falsehood (ie. I cannot speak a word of English)
5. Undeniability Test for Truth (ie. my existence)

The first three tests deal within a worldview system.  The final two deal with a system outside of itself.

E. Six Elements You Must Bring To Bear On 4 Questions

1. The worldview must have a strong basis in correspondance that is factual.
2. There needs to be a high degree of coherance.
3. The worldview should have explanatory power.
4. The worldview should avoid two extremes, will not be too simplistic (ie. atheism) or too complicated (pantheism.)
5. The wordview should have more than one line of evidence.
6. You need to be able to refute contrary worldviews.