I just got an unexpected free moment, so I’m going to jot down a post on a topic I feel is of great importance. A unique post was recently written by Evil Bender, one of my favorite atheist bloggers. In it, he states “humans, in short, cannot escape metaphor as a means of understanding.” I think this is true, depending on how one defines “metaphor”. I think of this kind of metaphor as “worldview”, a framework by which we interpret ideas.
Though I feel it’s very self-evident, it’s important to note that “facts” are always analyzed through the interpretive lens of a worldview. There is no such thing as an unbiased position on a fact, one can’t live in an analytical Switzerland. Thomas Kuhn’s work even implies that a priori worldview assumptions must be made before one can even know where and how to look for facts.
All this being said, the questions arise, how does one compare worldviews, and how are they chosen? Is either process rational, or will critical discussions and explorations on the topic always end fruitlessly?
Karl Popper’s “myth of the framework” idea is helpful to note here. Basically, he claims that people with entirely different worldviews, or sets of fact interpretations, can have meaningful dialogue if said dialogue is embarked upon in the the spirit of good faith rational criticism. Kuhn, on the other hand, wrote about the incommensurability of various worldviews. His work implies that people take up the banner of various worldviews for entirely irrational reasons (the verdict is out on whether he believed that implication).
I find it fascinating that atheists see these problems clearly when speaking of religion, but they typically refuse to see them when discussion turns to their own worldviews. They often speak in ways that imply an atheistic worldview is the clear default.
Presuppositionalism, typically spoken of as a style of defending religious beliefs based on the acceptance of scripture axiomatically, is, I think, probably the only coherent way to discuss theism and atheism. There is, ultimately, a large circularity inherent in any worldview, because all theories must gain authority from some axiomatic source. The comment discussion in my post Who Made God between myself and Arturo is a good example. Arturo felt I didn’t understand that the discussion was about an argument about arguments, because in his worldview, it is possible to use inferential deduction to show that it is necessary that inferential deduction is not necessary. This is axiomatic on his part, and no amount of my attempts to show the self-refuting nature of this idea would ever likely breach his worldview, because that one idea makes many other ideas he holds possible and justified. I don’t blame him at all, and in fact, I think the worldview built on this foundation is quite sophisticated. My own theistic worldview also requires axioms, and I readily admit it.
So then, back to the question of choosing and comparing worldviews. I currently think that a worldview is more or less justified depending on it’s degree of correspondence with reality. I think reality can be defined by both empirical and inferential evidence. I believe that critical rationalism is one of the best tools for determining correspondence, or what Popper called the “verisimilitude of truth”. I also think, though, that one’s worldview axiom must be highly systematic from that start, because arriving at justifiably actable knowledge via Popper’s critical rationalist system of essentially random (creative-imagination-based) hypothesis generation followed by attempts at falsification would require an almost infinitely long time period.
For anyone interested in determining their worldview’s correspondence to reality, I suggest the following (obviously biased) questions:
- does my worldview deny the orderliness and reasonably accurate measurability of the empirical world?
- does my worldview deny an objective source of morality and logic that exists independently of humanity?
- does my worldview deny immateriality (ideas, meanings, morality, value, etc.)
If your worldview does any of these things, I think it’s time to go shopping.
Posted by poppies
