ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-25
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I6LAYwN3Jk
if you so many of you are aware that we're living in an unsettled times in many societies throughout the world we have a feeling that there's increased polarization on the political level and this is perfectly true the United States where I come from where you may be aware that the long simmering culture wars of the last twenty years threatened to boil over under the current president
now when people try to come up with a you know a reason for why this polarization is taking place you more and more will hear the argument that %HESITATION at the root there really to embittered world views they're engaged in a struggle on the one hand secular liberalism and the on the other a conservative or religious conservatism so I want to talk to knight about world
view this is a very versatile term a term that %HESITATION is creeping up more and more in the media what makes it so unusual I think is that it's able to convey both a scientific rational understanding religious belief and political passion all three of those at the same time but it seems that there's no other term that is quite as adequate for describing both %HESITATION confrontations
with radical Islamism and also struggles within the United States between Republicans and Democrats so I I do want to talk about world you but I'll let you know straight off that I'm quite suspicious of the term world view Bob I think that if I pose the question what's in a world you my first answer would be hidden assumptions and what I want to explore with you
tonight are what are the the hidden assumptions that have been deposited in world view over the course of its two hundred year history so I'm gonna take a brief %HESITATION journey through the history of world view and try to uncover some of these assumptions with the aim it not that you will come away with feeling I now know what my worldview is but rather I want
you to question the very idea of world view that's my aim are I want to offer you to a to clear points of of entry into this topic on the one hand I want to explore the ways in which secular and religious actors have %HESITATION contributed to the invention of world view but also have propelled its development overtime and I think what's interesting is that there
are also hidden dialogues that go on between religious and secular actors through the term worldview the second thing that I want to talk to you about is the merger of politics and world view yeah if we talk about rise and fall of world view we can say that under national socialism there is a rise of world you the twenty th century and that in the United
States of the Cold War there's the fall of world view and now that we're re entering a rise of world view the question is what does the history tell us or how to help us a the first point we have to talk about is the origin of world view now review is not a concept that is already always existed I want you not to assume that
just because it makes intuitive sense to us that we have a world view right everyone sees the world in a certain way but the the idea of world view is it was invented in the nineteenth century and it was invented in Germany and it comes from the term very time show not two things occurred in Germany at that time I give rise to world view the
first thing was a revolution in natural science %HESITATION we heard earlier about the scientific revolution of the renaissance but what happens in the nineteenth century in Germany is that a group of doubtful scientists believe that it is possible to give a total description of the world from a few basic principles and here we see Alexander fun humbled a German explorer naturalist who writes a book called
%HESITATION because most which is an attempt to really enter first rough draft of this total history of the world through natural science and but one of the key elements of this world view is the notion of evolution so already before Darwin that Germans hadn't had latched on to the idea of evolution and on the evolution provides a total modeled for all human life at all derives
and emerges and and %HESITATION develops further through evolution the evolutionary process and here we see the tree of life from a German author from the mid nineteenth century I'm essentially it shows the totality of of biological life in a single diagram that is world view and this is it or worldview author the second thing that happens is that this total understanding of the world gets mobilized
against religion what happens is that the advocates of this new national scientific worldview argue that it has replaced the old worldview of Christianity %HESITATION in the process of replacing Christianity advocates of the New World you believe that it takes on also the attributes previously held by Christianity it provides a morality that provides an explanation of where we come from and where we're going and it provides
meaning for life and here we see a painting of a revolutionary be eighteen forty eight Robert bloom he was an advocate of the New World you also it does engage the revolution in here is about to be executed for his his participation in the revolution and you'll notice he's raised up his hand against the Catholic priest himself was a Catholic my background but hit now converted
to the New World you and the messages I don't need Christianity I'm secure in my secular worldview even at the moment of death okay so natural scientific worldview is essentially the first dominant world you in Germany now if you look online Eddie online bookseller you will find if you type in world view into the title search you will come up with something like a thousand titles
maybe maybe more of those the majority are written by advocates of religious worldview in other words they're still propagating worldview as something they what they aspire to and that we follow and within that group that by far the most numerous are advocates of what is known as Christian worldview no Christian worldview our authors are largely white evangelicals from the United States so that's an interesting fact
how is it that a term originating in secularism is now most actively propagated by the most conservative branch of Protestantism in the United States to understand that transition you have to go back up to the period around nineteen hundred and we now get a Dutch element to our story %HESITATION there's a famous answer famous theologian and politician Abraham Cooper he said that the enemy had it
had a vast army and that it had lined up a formation of fearsome formation on the battle line it had science universities political parties they're all United by world view what Christians needed was to match one for one dirt battle formation of the enemy and copper founded the university and they need it United with what with world view so he became an advocate of Christian worldview
in the year nineteen hundred around then now if this is a a picture I believe from United States topper was very influential in American %HESITATION circles Protestant circles particularly fundamentalists and they took CalPERS idea of Christian worldview and developed out of it a very intelligent defense of the Bible what they said was that in the past %HESITATION Christians used to try to defend the Bible when
attacked by non believers I'm on a kind of one by one basis they would if the non believer would argue about miracles Christians would argue about miracles you know creation in seven days right people that that have a knowledge of geology and so on would say ha ha can't possibly be true therefore the Bible is not true so the argument from world view was yeah the
important thing when reading the Bible is your mind set with which you read it if you're a Christian you are reading essentially different Bible than the non believer dot said that's world view right the Christian worldview that gives you different presuppositions and necessarily leads to different conclusions you see a different reality so the argument is that %HESITATION secular and Christian world use cannot communicate with one
another they are they are separate and they must remain separate in the interest of Christianity so that's Christian world you know what's interesting to sum up my first point tonight is that a we see that secular worldview is only possible out of a critique of religion but that Christian worldview or religion worldview in general if you use the term world view is really derived from secularism
okay in some of its key assumptions obviously not in its theology so that that's quite interesting fact there there's a mutual dependence if you so will on both of these understandings of world view as revealed in history and I think actually there's some hope in the contemporary culture wars for some type of dialogue on that basis right now we come to our second point which is
the merger of politics and worldview in the twentieth century okay so here here is an image of American %HESITATION of famous evangelical I think this is Billy Graham %HESITATION as a representative of the American embrace of Christian worldview now when we talk about political world view that we need to mention Adolf Hitler because the I. national socialism was in many ways the absolute high point of
the development of world view Hitler never spoke a rarely spoke of national socialism as a philosophy or an ideology but always as a vet on shown as a world view and he made an interesting innovation in the thinking about world you in the process he said that the other people who talk about world view the Christians and the secularists they make a mistake they always derive
their idea of world view from the trees okay they believe that truth is what makes worldview great Hitler said no what makes worldview great is its ability to unite the nation so the test of the world view as an ideal is its ability to unite the nation against its enemies and for Hitler that was kat communists and Jews so Hitler look back in history and said
when was Germany last United by a world view properly he said medieval Christianity the medieval church managed it but then the reformation came along separated Protestants from Catholics and role in religion from that point on became what divided Germans rather than United them so neither said if Germany is going to be reunited it has to be re United under a secular worldview when they can fight
Marxism and that's what he offered as national socialism so we can say that the rise of world view the zenith of world view is national socialism the second World War in many ways is a war of world views right certainly as far as as Marxism and national socialism are concerned but what of the third party to the conflict in Europe right what about the liberal democracies
the United States and the UK do they have a world view I'm thought is liberal democracy a worldview it's an important question especially today now at the end of the arm at the end of the Cold War the story at the beginning of the Cold War there were a group of American and European liberal intellectuals who pondered this question and they said that the answer is
no liberal democracy does not have a world view moreover the lack of a world view in liberal democracy is what makes liberal democracy superior to all the political system so the arm what they said was that America in particular had a specific intellectual tradition which had on the one hand pop pluralism unknown the other pragmatism so what that meant in the political realm was that you
would have a multitude of voices pluralism but they had to then engage in some kind of dialogue org for debate or a scientific investigation to Rive at pragmatic solutions %HESITATION to pragmatic understandings of truth at the end and they argue that that was the very antithesis of world view right worldview is a total system of explanation pragmatism pluralism are the antithesis they were so confident of
their position that in the year nineteen sixty a book was published called the end of ideology and it also clearly refers to the end of world view so they believed worldview was over in nineteen six and here's an image of of %HESITATION I don't know what this is I'm gonna guess hungry nineteen fifty six toppling a statue of Stalin but in a sense that the sense
of these Cold War liberals was that they had toppled those world views okay what is this teach us about America today okay American focusing on the United States here spell but I think that's where these debates about world your most intense at present so some what is lesson of of this historical tour for today in the United States now one of the things similar to the
notion of Christian worldview that reviews are separate and not supposed to mash not supposed to arrive at some kind of common ground dont it's not far from there to go to alternative facts now you may be aware of this statement that was made by that %HESITATION now press are that the spokeswoman of trump in January of this year that trump was offering alternative facts %HESITATION owned
in some dispute their alternative facts of course got a laugh at the time and some people are very irritated at this well but it does make sense from point of world view right because world views have alternative facts because they have alternative realities the other place we could look and say %HESITATION worldview thinking is that work is the debate over climate change %HESITATION many are conservatives
who reject climate change in the United States are not looking to engage in a serious scientific debates over climate change but rather insist on the importance of the validity of their perspective right images again we'll be thinking at work so to conclude I think that term there's a point to be made by a people that think with world views that %HESITATION the liberal press or liberals
in general are sometimes a bit blind to their own ideological position I mean they tend to assume that their position is shared by everybody okay that is a good valid criticism however when you start to talk in terms of world view a %HESITATION dialogue tends to end car and I do believe following the Cold War liberals that world you talk is bad for democracy because why
well the Cold War liberals said that pluralism is good but you can't it's not the end point it's not enough to just say there are two sides to every issue you have to also connect pluralism to some kind of pragmatic search for a solution to problems or for some type of compromise and to my thinking whatever worldview is invoked dialogue ends %HESITATION end and for that
reason I want you a movie my my %HESITATION suggestion that before use world you the next time you stop to consider the assumptions that go along with that term in the key assumption I believe is that thought that world views cannot engage in dialogue right but but my believe for my hope is that we can engage in dialogue and I I think that that is a
