Read Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Online
Authors: James W. Sire
It is an ethnological commonplace that the ways of becoming and being human are as numerous as man’s cultures. Humanness is socio-culturally variable. In other words, there is no human nature in the sense of a biologically fixed substratum determining the variability of socio-cultural formations. There is only human nature in the sense of anthropological constants . . . that delimit and permit man’s socio-cultural formations.
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What this means in worldview terms is that each culture or society’s understanding of what it is to be human rests on only a few common characteristics—pretheoretical givens—and is largely constructed by that society as it lives within its material context.
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“While it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to say that man constructs his own nature, or more simply, that man produces himself.”
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Berger and Luckmann continue at great length to explain the complex way human self-consciousness and knowledge relate to nature and to the social world. They conclude simply,
Man is biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set by nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself.
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How well these social constructions of reality comport with what reality actually is Berger and Luckmann do not say. They are doing a sociological study of what passes for knowledge in a society; they are not doing philosophy or even worldview analysis. So we should not jump to the conclusion that they are taking a philosophic position on what the really real or external reality really is. They are rather pointing out how ideas of what the really real is are mutually embodied in the mind and heart of individuals and in the surrounding society and larger culture. Their point is that the connection between the public and the private is symbiotic. “Men
together
produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations. . . .
Homo sapiens
is always, and in the same measure,
homo socius
.”
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Worldviews as Ideal Types
There is a second way that worldviews are public. When we refer to the Christian worldview—or naturalism, deism or pantheism, for example—we are acknowledging that there are more or less consistent and coherent systems of grasping reality that characterize whole societies or historical periods.
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These systems can be expressed in a series of propositions or stories that, while not necessarily held in exactly the same way by any single individual within that society, are generally characteristic of most people in that society.
It is also appropriate to speak of the worldview underlying a particular academic discipline or theories in an academic discipline or a profession. In academic psychology, for example, there are—or have been—both behavioral and cognitive psychology. Both are generally undergirded by naturalism, but there is enough difference at a basic level that one could draw a distinction between them at an almost worldview level. Skinnerian behaviorism, for example, assumes that there is no “inner person” or “soul” or “mind”; all there is is a “bundle of behavioral characteristics.” Rejecting that view, cognitive psychology assumes the existence of mind or soul or inner person who as an agent can act outside the nexus of mechanical cause and effect. So within the basically naturalistic worldview, two contrary notions can be found. In Christian theism, too, various Christians take a variety of stances regarding predestination and free will. Calvinists and Arminians alike have basically Christian worldviews.
Some critics of worldview thinking find this pluralism within worldviews distressing, as if the notion of worldview itself were made useless or suspect by such pluralism. If within the notion of worldview one cannot distinguish the true one from those that are false, they seem to be saying, Christians who are after the truth should abandon worldview thinking altogether. But the very notion that worldview thinking is useless as a tool in the search for truth or misleading in the hands of a genuine Christian is itself worldview dependent.
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Every declaration about worldviews is based on a worldview.
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A worldview is simply inescapable.
Plausibility Structure
Perhaps of more significance is the role the public embodiment of a worldview plays in supporting or undermining the unique and private worldview of each individual. To signal the importance of this fact, sociologists of knowledge have given us a special term. As we have seen, they are wary of using a term with roots in the history of philosophy. So they talk about plausibility structures. A plausibility structure is the web of beliefs that are so embedded in the minds and hearts of the bulk of a society that people hold them either unconsciously or so firmly that they never think to ask if they are true. In short, a plausibility structure is the worldview of a society, the heart of a society. The society can be of any size—for example, a small Amish community, an academic discipline like anthropology, or a whole nation or group of nations.
One of the main functions of a plausibility structure is to provide the background of beliefs that make arguments easy or hard to accept. If you ask me how to drive from Downers Grove to Westmont in Illinois, I could say, “Take Ogden Avenue east; it’s the next suburb.” If you ask me how I know, I could give a variety of answers. For example,
Only the first two of those fit the plausibility structure of most people living in the modern world. Even those who believe the Bible would not accept the third reason. They do not believe the Bible answers such questions. Even a New Ager might find the fourth answer bizarre.
But let us say you ask me how a person gets to heaven. When I reply, “You have to believe in Jesus,” you have a further question: “How do you know this?” In this case only the third answer would have a chance of being acceptable, and even it would be acceptable only among those holding a generally Christian worldview. In fact, giving that answer in a religion class in many secular universities would put you on the margin, for the Bible as an authority for anything is not a part of the typical university plausibility structure.
From the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge (as understood by Berger and Luckmann), what we human beings take to be the real nature of reality, including religious reality, is “constructed and maintained through empirically available social processes. Any particular religious world will present itself to consciousness as reality only to the extent that its appropriate plausibility structure is kept in existence.”
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If, for example, one’s community is largely Catholic, this religious view will “simply be taken for granted.” If the community becomes religiously pluralistic, that is, “if the plausibility structure is weakened,” then it will become easier and easier to doubt the truth of Catholicism. “What was previously taken for granted as self-evident reality may now only be reached by a deliberate act of ‘faith,’ which by definition will have to overcome doubts that keep lurking in the background.”
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I once heard the British biologist Richard Dawkins, author of
The Blind Watchmaker
, lecture on the nature of science as an enterprise at DePauw University, a liberal arts college in Indiana. He compared the notion of science that is largely accepted by the scientific community with the notions of science that appear in the pages of the British tabloids and that of astrology. During a question-and-answer session, I asked him why he did not compare “normal” science with the notion of “design science” as held by biologist Michael Behe and described in his book
Darwin’s Black Box
. His response was telling.
“Well, Michael Behe believes in God,” he said. In that audience of some fifty people, mostly college professors, he did not need to say any more. In
The Blind Watchmaker
Dawkins makes clear that science is predicated on completely naturalistic assumptions.
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Evolutionary science shows that one does not have to invoke God as an explanation for the changes in the biosphere that have brought about the biological complexity we observe today—including human beings. Besides, science is science, not religion. It must never allow nonnatural factors to play a part in explaining anything one observes in nature. In fact, evolutionary science has made it possible, Dawkins has written, for him to be a “fulfilled atheist.”
While no one else in the lecture hall might have said quite that, most of the audience of academic professionals would hold that God plays no role in science. When Dawkins accused Behe of believing in God, he needed to say nothing more. He had proved his point. The university plausibility structure provided a complete justification for Dawkins’s rejection of design science.
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After a slight dramatic pause, however, as he waited for his audience to mentally assent to his wisdom in omitting to mention design science as worthy of consideration (while astrology and the tabloids were worthy), he added, “And besides, Michael Behe is lazy. He should be trying to find the factors leading to the complexity of biological structures instead of attributing these structures to nonnatural factors.”
When I pointed out that his answer was an
argumentum ad hominem
, using the pretentious Latin rather than the ordinary English phrase “poisoning the well” or “name calling,” he hesitated a bit and then said, “Yes,” but then went further in stating just how lazy a scientist Behe is. My question had raised the issue whether natural causes can actually explain complex biological structures. He never addressed that.
A man in the audience then said, “I wonder if you know how difficult it is to teach science in the United States. People keep wanting us to teach
creationism
.” Thus did a red herring get dragged across the issue. For this had nothing whatsoever to do with my question. But in the exchange between Dawkins and myself, Dawkins had clearly come out on top.
Worldviews become plausibility structures by their adoption by a society or a segment of society (here, the academic community). When one’s individual worldview is identical to that of one’s society, there is no need for further proof that the worldview is true.
In some communities—like the scientific community in most universities—the plausibility structure is relatively detailed and single, or at least dominant. But in a pluralist society such as that in most of Europe and North America, the plausibility structure will be little more than a flimsy scaffold. Made up of a host of different large and small religious and secular communities, it has little binding power. The worldviews of one’s next-door neighbors may be as different as those that separated Marco Polo from Genghis Khan or Columbus from the Native Americans.
In the United States, for example, pluralism no longer means that some of us are Baptists and others Methodists, or some of us are Protestants and others Catholics. It now means that our next-door neighbors may be Rastafarians on one side and purely secular, nonreligious folk on the other. Down the block they are building a Hindu temple, and across town a mosque. Our hairdresser may be meditating each morning for twenty minutes on a seemingly meaningless mantra; our grocer sits in a yoga position for a half-hour each evening; our boss takes New Age management training from the Forum. Meanwhile, our churchgoing friends tell us they wonder about reincarnation, and some of them seek out a form of alternative medicine that implies that each of us is totally responsible for our own health, that we both make ourselves sick and have the power to make ourselves well. Everywhere we turn, we find someone with a view different from ours—each one contending that he or she is free to hold this view and is quite content to let us continue to believe whatever we want. As Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of
The New Republic
, puts it,
Pluralism, after all, is premised not only on difference, but on the proximity of difference: another way to live is never out of mind in America, because it is never out of sight. The sidewalks are crowded with incommensurabilities. You live and work and play with people for whom your view of the world is nonsense, or worse.
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Increasing worldview pluralism has over the past sixty years fostered the devastation of a plausibility structure that enabled easy belief in any of the formerly operative worldviews. The only unity that remains is the general agreement that anyone can believe anything at all: one claim to truth is as valid as any other. In popular parlance, what’s true for you doesn’t have to be true for me. Truth itself is seen to be either multiple and contradictory or not possible at all. The public nature of our current worldview has so impinged on the private character of any specific worldview that that private worldview no longer gives meaning and purpose to one’s life. “We live in a pluralist world” becomes “we live in a relativist world.”
Objective and Subjective
The course of my argument has now moved from the relationship between the public and private nature of worldviews to the struggle between their objective and subjective character. Given the private nature of worldviews, can they really be objective? Are they not always so subjective, so much
my
view or
your
view or even, sociologically speaking,
our
view (plausibility structure) that they are utterly unreliable? Is not the language system we use to think and communicate forever separate from the supposed reality about which we speak? This latter is, as we have seen, one of the main themes of postmodernism.