Asking Worldview Questions

Guest post by Jeff Mindler

Worldviews are everywhere; we simply cannot avoid them. James Anderson states this regarding worldviews, “Your worldview represents your most fundamental beliefs and assumptions about the universe you inhabit. It reflects how you would answer all the “big questions” of human existence, the fundamental questions we ask about life, the universe, and everything.” When one considers what a worldview is, the importance of knowing and identifying them in the apologetic encounter becomes clear, but the question arises: how do we identify a worldview?

James Anderson provides an excellent resource on just this very issue, knowing what questions to ask in order to discover a person’s worldview, in his work What’s Your Worldview? What is unique about this work is that it follows a type of “choose your own adventure” format wherein the reader is provided with several questions and based upon how they answer are prompted to advance to a certain page until they reach a conclusion, that being a particular worldview. The worldview they reach is the logical conclusion to how they have answered various questions about knowledge, reality, truth, goodness, religion, and God. By asking these types of questions we can quickly uncover what a particular person believes about the world and thus what they believe about God, the Bible, Jesus Christ, and the gospel and can thus focus on specific areas where the gospel and the claims of Christ need to be brought to bear.

Anderson also provides a brief analysis of each worldview and then proceeds to critique and expose the weakness’ of any worldview opposed to Christianity. For example, if a person reaches the relativistic worldview they will be met with a brief overview of what the worldview is and then challenged to reconsider a few things in light of its flaws, namely that relativism is self-defeating. It is impossible to be a consistent relativist, just consider the statement, “There is no objective truth.” Is that claim itself objectively true? If so, one can see how the position collapses upon itself based upon the contradiction of saying there is no objective truth but stating it as if it was an objective statement of truth. I believe Anderson’s work provides a helpful tool and resource for any level of apologist as a means to think about careful questions to ask unbelievers and to get them to reconsider what they believe and why they believe it.