Introduction to Worldviews, part 2 with Dr. Jeff Myers
To purchase the entire Summit Lecture Series, Vol. 2 on DVD, go to: summit.org.
Dr. Jeff Myers: I want to share with you tonight a way that, by the time we finished this evening, you actually know two things. Number one: you’ll know how to begin triangulating and identifying, with a reasonable probability, the ideas you’re facing and what they actually mean. How they answer our ultimate questions in life. Like what is the purpose of life? How should we live? What does it mean to be human? And so forth. And the second thing: you’ll actually have five questions you can ask in any given situation to try to discern the ideas that really lie below the surface.
So, “worldview” – that’s the term we’re going to continually use all throughout your time at Summit – a worldview we’ll define as a pattern of ideas; but also a pattern of beliefs, convictions and habits that help us make sense of God, the world, and our relationship to God and the world
So, it’s not just what we believe. It’s what we’re convinced of, to the point where we’re actually willing to sacrifice something for it. And, it’s the way we live our lives, and the way living our lives backfills into our worldview.
A lot of people’s worldview is shaped – or, their habits are not only shaped by their worldview, but their worldview is shaped by their habits. People choose a certain way of living and then seek to justify it, so they end up living out a particular worldview.
But it’s always a pattern of ideas. When we understand that’s a pattern, we can start to recognize that there are different ways and different fields of study that we’re identifying patterns is the key to leading you to success.
So I’ll use tennis for an example. Andy Roddick is famous for having the fastest serve. This guy can serve the tennis ball at 156 miles per hour. Think back to that tennis clinic you went to when you were a kid and the coach said, “Keep your eye on the ball!” If you are playing Andy Roddick, it doesn’t matter. You will never see the ball until it hits the fence behind you. S,o I asked a friend who I knew is a professional tennis player, “Have you ever played Andy Roddick?” He answered, “Of course.” I asked him, “What is his serve like?” He emailed me back, “Unbelievably enormous!” I asked him, “Have you ever returned his serves?” He replied, “Of course!” “How did you do it?” And then my friend, who is a professional tennis player, began to describe to me how it is actually possible – even though it’s scientifically impossible – to respond to an Andy Roddic serve in time. Because the distance is too short at that speed – at 156 miles an hour – the distance is too short for you to actually be able to respond and hit back Andy’s serve. Yet, people do it all the time. So, scientists are confused by this. But my buddy, who is a professional tennis player, was not confused by it. In fact, he said, “The answer is to identify patterns of serves. What does Andy Roddick do when he tosses the ball? How might he be able to see a little tiny adjustment in the position of the racquet? These are minute differences – patterns that somebody would only pick up after thousands and thousands of hours of play. But they do pick it up.
And then, just like baseball pitchers and baseball batters trying to hit off of a pitcher. They have to identify what pitch is likely to come across at certain moments when the pitcher is in a certain situation. Same thing. When Andy Roddick is at a certain place in the game, what kind of serve does he usually do? And if you can pick up the patterns well enough, you can actually know how to return the serve. All you can really know is whether the serve is likely to come on one side of you or the other. And then, the rest of it is just reflex and instinct. But the patterns are the key.
So, it takes a long time – thousands of hours – to develop those understandings of those patterns.
Let me give you an example from chess. It was thought for many years that chess grandmasters actually had a photographic memory. And this was reinforced in one study. They would show a partially played chess game to a chess grandmaster for just two or three seconds. And then the person would turn around and accurately reproduce the position of every single piece on the board. Photographic memory right? But then they played a trick on the grandmasters. They rearranged the pieces on the board but in such a way that they would never actually appear in a real chess game. Then they had the chess grandmasters look at that chess board for two or three seconds, turn around, and they found the level of recall of the chess grandmasters was not significantly better than the level of recall of the non-chess players used as a control group in the study. You see, the chess grandmasters don’t have a photographic memory, they just have the ability to look at patterns of play that would appear after they played hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of games.
So, it’s a matter of looking for the patterns.
I think the same thing is true in the world of ideas. You have often heard that knowledge is power. There’s actually a lot of truth to that. People who understand the times in which they live will be asked by those around them to take the lead. So, whether you have the opportunity to have a positive influence on your society or not, in large measure, depends on whether you have a basic understanding of the world of ideas.
But, the world of ideas is a much bigger world than just the world of tennis or the world of professional chess. Let me give you an example. Summit Ministries has a program in Oxford University. If you do really well at your University, you write well, you read well, you get good grades. Then, in your junior or senior year, you can take a semester and come study with us in Oxford University. Oxford University is perhaps the most well known university in the world. It’s made up of 42 different colleges and schools. Of the 42, Summit works with three of them that are in the top ten. So these are three of the top ten colleges in one of the top universities in the entire world. So, it’s a very prestigious opportunity. We work with Trinity College, New College, and Christchurch. To give you a sense of how old Oxford is, New College was formed in 1379. So, this is a very ancient place. One of the prominent features in the centre of Oxford is The Bodleian Library. The Bodleian Library has six million books and about five thousand associated artifacts. They have about 11 million catalogued items all together. If you like libraries, you would love The Bodleian Library. Anything you want to see, they probably have it. For example, if you’d like to see a Mozart manuscript of an opera that he wrote. Say, The Magic Flute. So, you want to see the manuscript of Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, or whatever it would happen to be. If you wanted to see something by Mozart, they don’t bring you a book that has Mozart scores in it. They can actually bring you the pieces of paper on which he actually wrote it. So, let’s say you were studying William Wilberforce. You’d say, “I’d like to read Wilberforce’s speech – the very first speech he ever gave to Parliament introducing the abolition of the slave trade.” They don’t bring you a book in which the manuscript of the speech is reproduced. They bring you his actual notes – the actual pieces of paper on which he wrote and from which he spoke. This is unbelievable. And the weirdest part, to me, is that they don’t have room in Oxford to store all of this stuff, so a lot of it is stored in climate-controlled warehouses in the countryside. And then, the artifacts you’ve requested ride into town on an underground conveyor belt in a perfectly controlled tunnel.
Is that not cool?
And then they bring them up to you in the Reading Room. I love The Bodleian Library. I love the idea of a library that has 11 million catalogued items in it. But it does get to be a little overwhelming.
If you know what I mean… I always start to think of 2 Corinthians 10:5,
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to the obedience of Christ.
How many thoughts are in 6 million books? I can’t even guess at that. Isn’t it safe to say it would be billions? Maybe tens of billions? Maybe hundreds of billions of thoughts that are inside 6 million books? How are you ever going to take all of those thoughts captive? There isn’t any way to actually do it unless you have a sense of how ideas flow in patterns. When you start to realize that ideas flow in patterns, you start to realize that God is not against knowledge; but you see knowledge and understanding all through Scripture.
Proverbs 2:6 For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth comes knowledge and understanding.
Proverbs 18:15 An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.
Hosea 4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
There are passages all over Scripture that talk about how important it is to gain knowledge. So why can’t we do this? Why have so many people in church today said, “Well, you know, I don’t have to know anything.I just love Jesus.”
But is that actually so, or did we pick that idea up along the way through some theology that may be a little bit warped? II’m not suggesting that every person has to be a genius. That’s not the point. The point is when we forsake the idea of knowledge, we’re forsaking something that God says is really important. So maybe we shouldn’t do that.
But why do people do it? Well, there are a lot of different reasons. One reason why people forsake knowledge is because they’re intimidated by what people in the world know.
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was a pastor in the 1800’s in New York City. He was intimidated by what he understood of the theory of evolution. He said, “Well if Charles Darwin is right, there is no need for a designer. So we have to make up a new way for God to be important, rather than just as an explanation of how everything came to be.”
So, here’s the explanation he made up:
“While we are taught by the scientists in truths that belong to the sensual nature, while we are taught by the economists of things that belong to the social nature, we need the Christian ministry to teach us those things which are invisible.”
What do you think of that? Does it get him out of the dilemma?
There are parts of science and economics that are not visible to us.
What is he saying that Christianity has to do with economics? Nothing. What does Christianity have to do with science? Nothing. He worked himself into a corner rather than saying, “Yeah, well, let’s see what Christianity would have to say about this.”
So, as CS Lewis said:
“I believe that Christianity is true. I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
So, what Beecher is saying, in trying to carve out territory for Christianity, is that Christianity gets the leftovers – the stuff that is invisible, the stuff that most people don’t believe actually exist. That’s what Christianity gets to deal with.
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(This podcast is by Summit Ministries. Discovered by Christian Podcast Central and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Christian Podcast Central.)