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There are certain things you need to learn and know that will help you become a mature and flourishing adult. If you get married, you want to be a good spouse, you wan tot learn how to be a great parent. These, along with being a great friend an neighbor are all things you want to strive for. Now, in order to gain these things, you need to attain knowledge about a number of things.
Knowledge give people the right to act in society.
For example, we give lawyers the right to draw up contracts and arbitrate in courts of law, but we don’t allow plumbers to do the same. And it’s not because lawyers have certain feelings or beliefs, but rather that there is a certain level of knowledge they have mastered that entitles them to engage in certain legal activities.
Plumbers have other kinds of knowledge and it’s on the basis of what they know that they are allowed to perform certain duties of their own. And we listen to their expert words in regards to our plumbing, where we wouldn’t do the same if a lawyer were to advice us about our pipes.
The reason is because the plumber possesses knowledge about what he is talking about.
So, you can start to understand that what gives people the right to act in public is not faith, but knowledge. Having faith in contracts or other legal reasoning doesn’t hold water. Having beliefs doesn’t matter. The same runs true regarding plumbers. If a plumber came to me without any knowledge but full of faith and beliefs in how my pipes should work, I wouldn’t hire them.
So, you can see, in light of this, why the worldview struggle is escalating in the manner that it is today.
People’s worldviews – whether they can articulate them or not – affect their whole orientation toward family, work, life, finances, time management and even the type of person you become.
In my view, there are three competing worldviews today. The first is Post Modernism, which is roughly based on the concept that you cannot truly know reality; and that everything is ultimately just a social construction that we create.
The second is Christianity – a widely adopted worldview amongst our American culture, which makes me proud and optimistic for our future. We have a lot of work to do, but there are great things happening on behalf of God’s kingdom.
Thirdly, there is Scientific Naturalism, which is the dominant worldview in universities and in the media. You can see proof of this by simply seeing whom the evening news quotes to speak with authority about the problems of our country. It’s largely scientists.
Scientists are the people we often turn to to speak with authority about what’s happening in the teenage culture, how we should solve our economic problems, social issues, etc.
Post Modernism tends to dominate a large percentage of the humanities in our society: communications, entertainment, literature, sociology, art, and even history.
The point is that these worldviews aren’t just in a book somewhere. They are day-by-day shaping your potential spouse, boss, children’s teachers and government officials.
And Christianity is at odds with these other two worldviews and there are fundamental differences between them. Because, while Post Modernism and Scientific Naturalism don’t agree on a lot, they do agree that there is no such thing as a non-scientific knowledge of reality.