Introduction to Worldviews, part 4 with Dr. Jeff Myers
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Dr. Jeff Myers: At Summit, we base our approach on a book written by David Nobel titled “Understanding the Times: The Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews”. In the book, David Noble says there are six different world views that are predominantly influential in the world. So, you see, there are hundreds of worldviews; but you don’t have to understand all the little ones. You don’t have to understand the little regional religions.You don’t have to necessarily even understand the religions that only people in one country believe. If you understand that if you look at the whole world and 90% of the people in the world fall into one of these six prominent worldviews, then you can make pretty good guesses about what’s actually going to be true.
That is the idea of probability. Let’s say, for instance, what’s going on sports-wise right now? Let’s say you are a fan of the Kansas City Royals. And, you believe the Royals are going to win the World Series. Somebody’s gotta win it. And they are going beat the Detroit Tigers in the playoffs. And, you firmly believe this to the point where you’re going to bet a thousand dollars that the Kansas City Royals will beat the Detroit Tigers in the American League playoffs. Okay? Let’s say you go to Las Vegas to place your thousand dollar bet and you find out there is a 1% chance that the Kansas City Royals will even be in the playoffs and a half percent chance that if they were in the playoffs they would be at the Detroit Tigers. Would you still bet your thousand dollars? Not unless you’re so rich you don’t even care, right? You wouldn’t bet it. I mean, if you did win, you’d win a lot of money in return. But, it’s just too risky. Now, let’s say you find out though there is a 30% chance the Kansas City Royals could win. Would you then place your thousand dollar bet? Some of you are saying, “Yeah!” I can see it in your eyes. You’re like, “I might… I might.” Yeah – you’re the real risk takers in the group! Let’s say you got to 51%. Now there’s a better-than-not chance that the Kansas City Royals would win. Would you go place your thousand dollar bet? You’re like, “Sure… yeah… cuz I got a better than one-in-two chance. It’s only logical to place the bet, assuming I have the thousand dollars that I want to spend in that way.”
Now, I’m not commenting on the ethics of betting, you understand, I’m just trying to give examples about probabilities. Let’s say you got to the place where the odds makers were saying there is an 85 percent chance that the Kansas City Royals will win the American League playoffs. Would you then place your thousand dollar bet? Yeah, most of you would say, “Yes!” Because there’s only a 15 percent chance you could be wrong. At 85 percent chance you would be right, you’re pretty likely to be successful with your bet.
So, at some point, when you get to 51% or better – the same thing is true in the world of ideas – you don’t have to know with 100 percent certainty what somebody believes. If you can make just a reasonably good guess, then you can figure out what’s going on in the times in which you live. If you know that somebody you’re voting for – every time a bill has come up to raise taxes they voted yes and now they’re saying, “Well, I’m going to run for office and I’m not going to vote for any taxes.” What’s the smart thing to do? Trust what they did, not what say they’re going to do, right? Because, they’re the kind of person who – when they get in that situation – will almost always end up doing what they have done in the past… not what they promised they’re going to do. So, be very careful about that kind of thing.
Well, you’ve got six different worldviews – Chrisitanity, Islam, Secular Humanism, Marxism-Leninism, Cosmic Humanism and Post-Modernism. Then you have ten different categories. So we look at theology, philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology, sociology, law, politics, economics and history. Why don’t we look at engineering? There just aren’t a lot of debates over the world of ideas and engineering. The load-bearing capacity of a foundation that’s at a certain level doesn’t change based on how you feel about it. If you go to a brand new bridge and you say to the engineer, “Is this bridge safe?” And the engineer says, “I feel so good about how we collaborated together to make this bridge.” I don’t feel so good about the collaboration process. I don’t want to hear that he feels good about it. I want to hear that he took into account the the principles and rules of engineering. Could we have been wrong about those things? Yes. But, in engineering, people don’t debate about whether 2+2=4… or 4.1… or whatever. It’s only in the social sciences, theology, philosophy, things like that, where people come up with ideas that are so hard to grapple with that they can easily error. That’s why it’s so important to look at these ten areas.
Alright, let me give you an example from my own graduate school. See if you can figure this one out. And again, we’re only looking at probabilities here. We’re not trying to find any certainties in it. We’re just trying to triangulate what’s the good chance that something will be true or untrue. So, let me give you an example. I went to Graduate School at the University of Denver to get my doctoral degree. 25 people were admitted to my program. We were told ahead of time, “Only seven of you will graduate, based on our historical averages.” I wanted to know immediately, “What do you do with the other eighteen?” I mean, are they buried in the backyard? What’s going on? What happens? No, no… they just drop out. Only seven ever graduate. That’s right, I committed right away. I want to be one of the seven. Which means I have to do things right from the very first class. So, I look at the class schedule, and it was a complete surprise. The very first class we were all scheduled to take from one of the star professors was called Psychology of the Spoken Language. So look down the list of disciplines (Theology, Philosophy, Ethics, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Law, Politics, Economics and History) and guess which field we are likely in? My guess was Psychology. It’s called Psychology of the Spoken Language. So, it’s probably in the realm of Psychology. Could it possibly actually be an economics class? Sure, it could be. But, I’m not trying to lock down everything here. I’m just trying to make some good guesses. The fact that psychology is in the title of the class makes it a pretty good guess. So, I know I’m in the psychology field, then I went to the bookstore to get the book. The textbook was by a man named L.S. Vygotsky. this was a little harder. Take a wild guess as to which of those six worldviews he was likely coming from. Marxist worldview. Why do you say Marxist? Okay, it sounds Russian. What’s the connection between Russian and Marxist? Yeah, Russia was for many years before your lifetime called the USSR – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was the country in which a man named V.I. Lenin and his successors tried to put into practice the principles of Karl Marx. We’ll get into the Marxist worldview at another time, but Vygotsky sounds like a Russian name. It’s a very good chance that he came through a Marxist system. So, again, we’re just making a guess… but I think it’s probably a pretty good guess. I say a good guess, because I went to the encyclopedia and found a very simple description of L.S. Vygotsky. The very first thing I learned about him was he was a student of Ivan Pavlov. Ivan Pavlov would study these dogs. He would ring a bell when he fed them. And then he found, after a while, he would ring the bell and they would anticipate the food. Their bodies would anticipate the food. They began to generate saliva in anticipation of the food at the ringing of the bell. This is a very exciting result, because it meant that he could create certain conditions in which he could control the dogs. The Marxist authorities went wild over his research because they believed human beings are just like dogs – except we are on two feet. We don’t have souls, or spirits, or whatever. In fact, the idea that Pavlov put forward was called Monism. it’s a form of behaviorism. An “ism” is a belief. “Mo” means “one”, so Monism is “a belief in one”. Not one leader – one substance. A person is made up of one substance. So, whereas the Christian would say, “Yes, we have bodies; but we also have souls.” That would not be Monism. Monism would be, “We only have one substance.” And what do you think it is, to the Marxist? Bodies. Karl Marx said, “Human beings are simply matter in motion.” Marvin Minsky said, “Your brain is a computer made of meat.” There’s no such thing as a soul, no such thing as a spirit. no such thing as transcendent principles, no such thing as a mind. We are only bodies. That doesn’t mean we can’t think. And this is where L.S. Vygotsky came into the picture. But, that was his idea. So, the Marxist authorities love Pavlov because he was giving them the psychology they believed they needed to control the whole world.
So, I knew all of this going into my class: Psychology of the Spoken Language, 25 students, it was the very first class we took. What am I supposed to do now? Do I go in and say, “Professor, are you a closet Communist? Admit it! This textbook author is a Commie. We should not be reading this!” There would be 24 students left in the graduate program. I would be the first one out. You’ve got to play it smart. So, what do you do? All I did was ask questions. I just came in and said, “Professor, before we get started with everything else, can you just give us a little of the history of our textbook author? Just tell us a little of the intellectual history of L.S. Vygotsky. What did he do, so we can become familiar with him?” So, he said, “Well, that’s a good question. L.S. Vygotsky was…” But, he never mentioned Ivan Pavlov. So, I said, “Well. I understand that L.S. Vygotsky was a student of Ivan Pavlov. Is that what you understand to be true?”
He replied, “Yes. It is, in fact. Good point. Really interesting that you know that. Why do you ask?”
I said, “Because L.S. Vygotsky is considered by historians to have been a hack for the Communist Party, giving up his psychology to enable them to try to control the masses. And I’m just curious as to what you think L.S. Vygotsky took away from his mentor and what he left behind from his mentor.”
The rest of the class is sitting, looking at me like, “Are we supposed to know this already?” Honestly, it felt like cheating. It really did. Because I didn’t know a whole lot. My professor started to treat me as if I was smart. I never told him the truth – that I’m not. I just read a book and the book gave me a little of the history of Marxist psychology; and then I went back and read a little of the history of Christian psychologies for a little bit of perspective and balance. And I understood more than all of my classmates about the world of ideas, going in, after reading two chapters that were eight pages each. So, as we say in Tennessee, this ain’t rocket surgery. You can do this. Does that make sense, so far?
Second thing and then we’re going to wrap it up. Now, I’m going to do my dead level best to make this as interesting as I know how. I have written on this throughout the last year-and-a-half, teaching on it is a whole other matter. At one point, John Stonestreet was going to do these lectures, and I said, “John, why don’t we just flip all of our talks. You do all my talks and I’ll do all your talks.” I have no idea why I said that. It seemed like a good idea at the time. So, now I’m doing worldview talks.
But there’s another piece to this. It’s learning to develop the ability to ask questions. It’s not just understanding how to triangulate ideas, But how to ask questions.
2 Timothy 2:25-26 says,
And the Lord servant must not quarrel. Rather, he should be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.”
So, what is a gentle approach? A gentle approach is to express curiosity. Let me just give you some very quick examples of this. Example number one: One of my professors said to us in class, “Well, we all understand that the God of the Old Testament is a mean bully.” He said it as if it is self-evidently true and everybody in the class is like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.” But, I wondered, “Is it actually self-evidently true? Is there something more to it?” So, in that situation, I raised my hand and I asked this question – or some variant of it, and you could ask a similar question – “Do you think that’s the whole story? I mean, are you so willing to dispense with 4,000 years of Judeo American history with one sentence that the God of the Old Testament is a mean bully? Do you think that’s the whole story?” And obviously, he said, “Well, of course not.” But, then he was in a dilemma, wasn’t he. Because he had just made a statement and then backed off of it very quickly. He realized how politically incorrect it could come across. Some people don’t really care that it’s politically incorrect, but if he said, “Well yes, I’m sure of it.” Then he would have been in an even more awkward position. Because, if he was sure of it, that means that he alone – of all the people who have studied this question – is the expert on what constitutes being a mean bully. And that he had studied all of the situations, that he had assumed that Israel was an aggressor nation, rather than a nation that was being oppressed by terrorists… on and on, there were all kinds of things that he didn’t take into consideration. So, asking the question, “Do you think that’s the whole story?” opens the discussion wider, rather than narrowing it – which is almost always a good idea.
Second question you can ask: What do you mean by that? If somebody says, “There is no God.” Don’t say, “Yes there is!” Because they’ll say, “No there isn’t” And you’ll say, “Yes there is.” And they’ll say, “No there isn’t” And you’ll say, “Yes there is, you moron.” And they’ll say, “No there isn’t, you idiot.” And all of a sudden, you are in a quarrel. That’s right. That’s what happens next. What do you mean? If somebody says, “There is no God.” Don’t say, “Yes there is.” Just ask them, “What do you mean by ‘God’?” One guy said, “Well, you know, the big grandfather figure in the sky who throws lightning bolts down to people he doesn’t like.”
“Zeus?”
“No. I don’t believe in Zeus, either.”
So, that’s a little bit baffling. But, let’s go a little bit deeper. Asking for definitions of the terms takes the discussion deeper. So, you’ve got a question that broadens it and you’ve got a question that takes it deeper.
The third question: How did you arrive at that conclusion? This question takes it from the outside to the inside. Let’s say, for instance, if somebody says to you, “Well… I can’t believe in a God who is good because there’s so much evil in the world.” If you ask the question, “How did you arrive at that conclusion?”, a person will often say, “When I was a kid, I prayed for my aunt that she wouldn’t die from cancer. She died anyway.” You see how it’s not a logical way of thinking about the question, but it is a way of processing. It’s very personal to that individual. It comes back to a source of pain that’s been externalized in this general life statement that God can’t exist. Do you see that? And, you would approach that differently if you understand what the person’s motivation is. You wouldn’t approach it by saying, “Well, we need to go back and study all the arguments for theodicy…” No, you would say, “Gosh, that must have been really hard. I’m really sorry. Tell me about your aunt, and your relationship, and why you felt so disappointed.” And you say, “But, we don’t want to talk about that. We want to get that person over it, so they can accept the truth.” That’s not actually so. You might just want to say, “Tell me what happened. Talk to me about that.” And then, gradually, you might want to be able to say something like, “Help me understand how that personal pain that you felt… tell me how you believe it makes a valid generalization about the whole world.”
“Well, I’m not saying there isn’t a God, I’m just saying I can’t believe in one.”
“Well, what if it isn’t about our belief? I mean, if there actually is a God, then whether we believe He exists or doesn’t is really not relevant, is it?”
Do you see how you can bring the discussion back around to the two ideas? But, you don’t want to be so crass and callous to not understand why a person would say the kind of thing they say in the first place.
Fourth question you can ask: How do you know that what you believe is true?
I’ll give you a quick example of this. A buddy of mine, Rusty, takes groups of students on a tour of the Denver Museum of Natural History. When he goes into the museum with them, he always tells them, “If anybody asks you anything, just ask him ‘How do you know that’s true?’” It’s a very simple question. So, they walked in the museum. There was a person in the museum with a white lab coat on, going to prove to them how we can show that humans evolved from pre-human ancestors using paleontology. The students didn’t know anything about paleontology. They just knew one question to ask. Every time she made a claim, they just raised their hand and asked, “How do you know that’s true?” After they asked it four or five times, this person threw up her hands and said, “Look, children… I don’t know, okay?! I just work here!” In a way, I felt bad for her, because there’s nothing more dangerous than a group of children with a question, right? I mean, how many of you have little brothers and sisters? Giving them a question is the intellectual equivalent of giving them a surface-to-air missile. They will shoot it. You put it above the fireplace, they sit on the back porch waiting for something to fly over. I mean, that’s just the way children are. And, you can understand, at first, I was fine… I felt sorry for her, because there were all these children asking this obnoxious question. But, then they realized she didn’t have to frame it the way she did. She could have said, “ There are certain people in the world who believe in evolution. And, in order for evolution to actually be true, or to explain the whole of the world and why we have the diversity of life we have, human beings have to have somehow evolved as well. What did they evolve from? Evolutionists believe this, and I’m going to show you why they believe what they believe, and you can understand and try to evaluate the question. That would have been a very fair way of stating it. But that’s not what she did. Instead, what she did was try to overpower them with, “I am the scientist.” Even wearing the white lab coat was a strong symbol of, “I know what I’m doing. I’m in charge here.” Do you see the point? So, the goal of asking the question is not to try to make the person feel like a fool, but to try to deconstruct all of those symbols that they used to build up their power in a false way – to try to promote ideas that are actually wrong.
Fifth question: What happens if you’re wrong? I found in my life, that at the University Campus, I wanted to talk to people. That’s what I wanted – to have discussions. 35,000 students attend the University of Illinois. 35,000 students. You know what’s weird – last time I was at the University of Illinois, nobody talked to anybody else. It was kind of weird. Everybody walks out of the building, they’re on their phones. They’re listening to music on their headphones. It’s not like you have a community of 35,000 people who are all excited to be part of the same University. It’s like you have 35,000 people who are all in their own little worlds. If you walk up to somebody and start a conversation, they freak out! They’re like, “Whoa, you scared me, dude! Can’t you see I’m texting right now?” But, if they set up an exhibit on campus and hand out literature, you could go talk to them all you want. So, I went to the Student Union when everybody was having their exhibits. My favorite day of all the whole year was Animal Rights Day. That day, everybody set up their tables and they were all handing out literature, so I walk up to one guy and asked, “What are you doing?”
“We’re saving the baby harp seals.”
“Why?”
“Well, look at them, dude.” And, he showed me a picture. They’re white and fuzzy with big black eyes.
I said, “What happens to them?”
He said, “Look…” and he showed me some pictures of some men clubbing them. And all of a sudden, they’re covered with blood. These poor, little, helpless harp seal pups are covered in blood. They take the skin off and they turn it into coats. I was like, “Haven’t they ever heard of gore-tex? Come on, why do you need to take the skins off of the harp seals and make them into coats? It just it seems just like bad stewardship to me.”
So anyway, I was just thinking that, and then I asked him a couple questions: “Do you save the grown-up harp seals as well?” He didn’t know. I later found out why. I saw a picture of a grown-up harp seal. They don’t stay cute. Grown up harp seals look like Jabba the Hutt. It’s just so much easier to save cute things than ugly things. So, I started to learn my lesson about the persuasive techniques. And, if you only have a few minutes with somebody, and you show them a picture of something cute, you’re gonna get their heart. You can’t really get their mind, but you can get their heart right away. So, I said, “Well that’s really terrible that they club those harp seals. But why do you care about this? You don’t have any real investment in it. You don’t live in the Arctic or whatever. I mean, what is the big deal for you? If he would have said, “Look, don’t you think this is bad stewardship – to kill the baby harp seals?” I mean, somebody’s gonna come after them. In this case, it was Eskimos coming after them. But, if he would have said, “I think it’s bad stewardship. I think we should just let nature take its course. I don’t think we should be killing them and making coats out of them.” I probably would have said, “I agree with you. That makes sense to me. I have no dog in this fight.”
But that’s not what he said. What he said to me was, “Who are we to say that we are any better than any other creature?”
And he said it with such an attitude, that I was thinking, “That is an opening big enough to drive a truck through, and I like to drive.” So, I said, “Well, what do you do with the creatures that are not politically correct? For example, dust mites.” Dust mites can live in carpet. They can live in your bed. They live in your garage. They live in your house. You have millions of them. According to reports about this, they’re so tiny they float around in the dust. I should mention they’re tiny. But they colonize on you and they start to make you itch. So, what do you do? Well, you take a shower and you put shampoo in your hair and that gets rid of them.
But, then I asked this guy, “Do you bathe?”
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “Do you shampoo?”
“Yes.”
“Have you any idea what shampoo does to the bodies of dust mites?”
He said, “No.”
I said, “Well, they swallow it in their mouth and it goes inside. It poisons them, and they rupture, and they die, and they wash down the drain. Dead.
He said, “Why are you telling me this?”
I said, “Because, if it’s really true – ‘Who are we to say that we are any better than any other creature?’ – How do you justify being a mass murderer of dust mites?”
And he thought that was funny – which I was glad. Because, I didn’t want to offend him, but I did want to have a vibrant discussion. So, we ended up talking about where and how we would decide.
You end up in a discussion of worldviews every time, when that happens. It just makes sense.
So, let me give you this in closing. John Woolman used the power of questions. You’ve probably heard a lot about William Wilberforce – how he was able to get a bill passed in Britain abolishing the slave trade, ultimately abolishing slavery in the British Empire. But, John Woolman is a lesser-known story. He was a Quaker farmer in the United States of America who came to the conviction by thinking Biblically about persons – that owning slaves was wrong. So, he freed his slaves. Then he went around to his neighbors to ask them to free their slaves as well. But he didn’t ask them to free the slaves by pressuring them or trying to manipulate them or making them feel guilty. Instead, he just asked questions: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to put a person in your will and hand that person down in the same way that you would hand down a piece of furniture to somebody in the next generation?
And, by the end of John Woolman’s life – if you’re an English major, you may actually end up reading his journals – there was not a single Quaker in the United States of America who owned a single slave. It was the power of questions that brought about right action.
So, if we can understand and triangulate certain things about the world of ideas, and we know the right questions to ask, and express them with curiosity rather than with cynicism or belligerence, we can – over time – learn how to have more fun in conversations with people, but also learn to dive right in without intimidation and gently instruct. And hopefully God will lead them to repentance.
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