What is a worldview?

2.1.1 A view from philosophy

The term “worldview” comes from the German Weltanschauung, itself a portmanteau of the words Welt (world) and Anschauung (outlook or view). According to Naugle (2002), it was first used by Immanuel Kant in his 1790 work Critique of Judgement but only in passing and never as a fully-developed concept (p. 58).

Instead, the first person to popularize the term and to develop a comprehensive theory of worldviews was the nineteenth century German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (Holmes, 1983; Hodges, 1998; Naugle, 2002). In addition to his work on worldviews, Dilthey is also known for highlighting the distinction between the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) and the “human” sciences (history, law, etc.) and for making significant contributions to the study of hermeneutics.

Dilthey's theory of worldviews is based on his understanding of the nature of the human psyche. He saw three main types of “mental acts” or “attitudes” appearing in human consciousness: cognitive, affective, and volitional (Hodges, 1998, p. 37).

These can also be labelled thinking, feeling, and willing – or reason, emotion, and will – and were the three human faculties emphasized by eighteenth century psychology (Holmes, 1983). According to Hodges (1998), Dilthey also saw a worldview as having three main components, corresponding to the three mental acts: “The first is a belief about the nature and contents of the world of facts; the second, built on this foundation, is a system of likes and dislikes, expressed in value-judgments; and the third, resulting from the two preceding it, is a system of desires and aversions, ends, duties, practical rules and principles” (p. 92). In other words, according to Dilthey, a worldview includes an ontological component (based on reason), an axiological component (based on emotion), and a praxeological component (based on will).

Makkreel (1992) explains it this way: “a Weltanschauung (world-view), as Dilthey conceived it, is an overall perspective of life which encompasses the way a person perceives the world, evaluates and responds to it” (p. 346, emphasis added).

Not only did Dilthey use the idea of three primary mental acts to break down the definition of worldview into three main components, he also used them to develop a theory of worldview types. He felt that in each individual, one of the three attitudes (cognitive, affective, or volitional) tends to dominate and that this gives rise to one’s worldview “type.” Hodges (1998) writes, “The three basic attitudes can never reach a perfect balance in any mind... one must prevail and colour the Weltanschauung accordingly. This gives rise to three main types of outlook, which Dilthey calls naturalism, objective idealism, and the idealism of freedom” (p. 99). Thus, there are three main components of a worldview (ontological, axiological, and praxeological), as well as three main worldview types (naturalism, objective idealism, and the idealism of freedom). The connections between the three mental acts, the three worldview components, and the three worldview types are summarized in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Wilhelm Dilthey’s theory of worldview

Mental act or the nature and contents of the world of facts (ie. how

Praxeological - a system of desires and aversions, ends,

Naturalism Objective idealism Idealism of freedom

The naturalist type of worldview corresponds to the cognitive mental act and focuses on how humans are similar to the rest of nature. It rejects the

other-worldliness of religion and sees the physical, material world, as experienced through sense perception, as being the prime (or only) reality. According to Hodges (1998), it is associated with Democritus, Protagoras, Epicurus, Hume, and Comte (p. 88). On the other hand, objective idealism corresponds to the affective side of human experience and sees reality as a living, divine whole—much more organic than mechanical. It focuses more on one’s inner experience of the world and is associated with Hinduism, Spinoza and Hegel (Hodges, 1998, p. 89). Finally, the idealism of freedom corresponds to volition and emphasizes humanity’s experience of free will and a morality which is not based on physical causation. It is the worldview of theistic religions such as Christianity but can also be found in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle (Hodges, 1998, p. 88).

Over the years, other philosophers have come up with their own worldview definitions and typologies (e.g. - Pepper, 1970; Centore, 1979; Gellner, 1992).

However, none have strayed far from Dilthey’s original theory. Thus, Dilthey’s definition based on three main components as well as his three main worldview types remain one of the simplest and most useful conceptualizations of worldview to this day.

2.1.2 A view from religion

In recent decades, several conservative Christian writers have utilized the worldview concept as a way to defend Christianity against other competing ideologies (Brown & Phillips, 1996; Cosgrove, 2006; Geisler & Watkins, 1989; Nash, 1992;

Noebel, 1994; Walsh & Middleton, 1984). Most popular among these religious writers is James Sire, author of The Universe Next Door. He defines a worldview as,

“a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or

inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being” (Sire, 2004, p. 17). He goes on to frame the basic elements of a worldview in the form of seven questions (p. 20-21):

1. What is prime reality – the really real?

2. What is the nature of external reality, that is the world around us?

3. What is a human being?

4. What happens to a person at death?

5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?

6. How do we know what is right and wrong?

7. What is the meaning of human history?

Sire’s definition, as well as his questions, share much in common with Dilthey’s original conceptualization. His “presuppositions about the basic constitution of reality” (upon which questions 1-4 are based) match Dilthey’s cognitive domain in that they are primarily concerned with ontological issues. The affective domain, with its concern for value-judgements, is covered by question six and the volitional domain, with its concern for practical ends, is covered by question seven. The one question in Sire’s list that does not come up directly in Dilthey’s conceptualization is question five: Why is it possible to know anything at all? This question deals with epistemology, a possible fourth component of a worldview.

In terms of a worldview typology, Sire offers a list that is much longer than Dilthey’s. Sire (2004) discusses eight worldviews: Christian theism, deism,

naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, eastern pantheism, new age, and postmodernism.

Other Christian writers offer typologies ranging from two to seven worldviews.

Interestingly though, all of these various lists can be easily re-categorized according to Dilthey’s original three worldview types. For example, Sire’s naturalism, deism, nihilism, and existentialism are all varieties of Dilthey’s naturalist type. Sire’s eastern pantheism and new age are both varieties of Dilthey’s objective idealism, and Sire’s Christian theism is a variety of Dilthey’s idealism of freedom. The only one of Sire’s worldviews that doesn’t fit within Dilthey’s original framework is postmodernism.

Regardless of what one thinks of Sire’s claim that his particular worldview (ie.

Christian theism) is superior to all others, it is clear that his conceptualization and typology of worldview has strong philosophical roots and has not strayed far from Dilthey. Most important however, is the fact that he includes epistemology as an additional component of a worldview, a component that is also included in the psychological and interdisciplinary perspectives considered below.

2.1.3 A view from psychology

The worldview concept has been discussed within the realm of psychology, going back at least as far as Sigmund Freud. In his lecture “ The Question of a Weltanschauung”, Freud defines a worldview as, “an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a

comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place” (Freud, 1933/1990).

He goes on to mention four worldviews — science, religion, art, and philosophy (and later, a fifth: Marxism) — but does not delineate the components of each. Rather, most of the lecture is based on defending his view that the scientific worldview (upon which he claims psycho-analysis is based) is superior to both the religious and

Marxist worldviews.

A more comprehensive as well as more recent theory of worldview from a psychological perspective has been developed by Mark Koltko-Rivera. In his far-reaching summary of the worldview concept, Koltko-Rivera (2004) reviews eleven different worldview theories and then uses them to develop forty-two possible dimensions related to the concept. Although his end result is likely too complex a conceptualization for the purposes of the present project, he also offers a very detailed definition of the term “worldview” that, like Sire’s, does not stray far from Dilthey’s original: “A given worldview is a set of beliefs that includes limiting statements and assumptions regarding what exists and what does not (either in actuality, or in principle), what objects or experiences are good or bad, and what objectives, behaviors, and relationships are desirable or undesirable. A worldview defines what can be known or done in the world, and how it can be known or done” (p. 3). Once again we have a cognitive component based on ontology (“what exists and what does not”), an affective component based on axiology (“what objects or experiences are good or bad”), and a volitional component based on praxeology (“what objectives, behaviors, and relationships are desirable or undesirable”). However, like Sire, Koltko-Rivera adds a fourth component based on epistemology: “what can be known or done in the world, and how it can be known or done”.

Although Koltko-Rivera does not offer a typology of worldview like Dilthey and Sire do, the fact that he breaks down the concept of worldview into similar components is significant. Taken together, the views discussed here from three separate fields — philosophy, religion, and psychology — offer a definition of

worldview that can be broken down into four major components: ontology, axiology, praxeology, and epistemology. A final, interdisciplinary perspective builds on these four components even further and offers one of the most clear and concise

conceptualizations of worldview to date.

2.1.4 An interdisciplinary view

The Centre Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies (CLEA) is located at the Free University of Brussels and is named after the Belgian philosopher Leo Apostel.

Unlike Dilthey, who highlighted the distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities, Apostel was known for his attempts to bring the two back together again.

One of the primary objectives of CLEA is to build upon the work of Apostel by studying worldviews. According to CLEA’s manifesto (Aerts, Apostel, De Moor, Hellemans, Maex, Van Belle & Van der Veken, 2007), a worldview seeks to answer the following seven questions:

1. What is the nature of our world? How is it structured and how does it function?

2. Why is our world the way it is, and not different? Why are we the way we are, and not different? What kind of global explanatory principles can we put forward?

3. What future is open to us and our species in this world? By what criteria are we to select these possible futures?

4. Why do we feel the way we feel in this world, and how do we assess global reality, and the role of our species in it?

5. How are we to act and to create in this world? How, in what different ways, can we influence the world and transform it? What are the general principles by which we should organise our actions?

6. How are we to construct our image of this world in such a way that we can come up with answers to (1), (2), and (3)?

7. What are some of the partial answers that we can propose to these questions?

(p. 13)

Another publication from CLEA (Videl, 2008) simplifies the above questions in the form of a table, reproduced below as Table 3. (Note that in Videl’s table, the seventh question is left out, because it is considered to be a meta-question):

Table 3: Six components of a worldview

Question: Philosophical Discipline:

1. What is? Ontology (model of reality as a whole)

2. Where does it all come from? Explanation (model of the past) 3. Where are we going? Prediction (model of the future) 4. What is good and what is evil? Axiology (theory of values) 5. How should we act? Praxeology (theory of actions) 6. What is true and what is false? Epistemology (theory of knowledge)

Here again, we find Dilthey’s original three components in questions 1, 4, and 5. We also have Sire and Koltko-Rivera’s additional component, epistemology, in question 6. But we also have two new components, covered by questions 2 and 3.

These are based on one’s beliefs about the past as well as one’s beliefs about the future and are labelled by Videl as explanation and prediction. Both explanation and prediction are dependent on one’s ontology but also serve important roles as

additional components in their own right. Explanation deals with the origin of the world and henceforth will be referred to as the “cosmological” component. Prediction deals with the direction and purpose of the world and henceforth will be referred to as the “teleological” component. With the addition of these two new elements, CLEA’s definition of worldview has a total of six main components: ontology, cosmology, teleology axiology, praxeology, and epistemology.

As the most comprehensive yet also the most clear and concise

conceptualization of worldwide, this final, interdisciplinary approach offered by

CLEA will be the one used in the next section to explore the worldview-level beliefs held by atheists.