Christianity
Of
the different worldviews I studied in my worldview class, I had expected to
know the most about Christianity–which was indeed the case, but I still learned
quite a bit! We learned that
Christianity is really very different from most other worldviews. Christians believe that there is only one
God, but He exists as three different persons in the Trinity, and that He is a
personal and loving God who is perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing, and much
more. The Christian argument for the
existence of God is that since every design must have a designer, and every law
has someone who instituted it, creation must have a Creator.
Christian philosophy teaches first and
foremost that truth is absolute and comes from God. The subsequent view of reality is that it
consists of both the natural and the supernatural–the things that you can
touch, see, hear, and smell, but also the things that you can’t. Therefore, both our minds and our bodies are
equally reliable. In other words, we
don’t rely only on science, or only on our own thoughts, but we combine both.
Their ethical code teaches that right and
wrong are grounded in the character of God, which can be seen at work in the
bible, and they are one of the few religions that believe in an absolute
standard of morals. They also believe
that God gives everyone a conscience which shows His absolute moral code.
Finally, the Christian view of how life began
is that God created each life form separately in the course of 6 days, though
since then, they have likely experienced microevolution–meaning they have had small changes to help them adapt, but
none have turned into a separate species altogether.
Islam
Of
all the other worldviews studied, I found Islam to be the most similar to
Christianity. Muslims agree with
Christians about the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing God, but they
believe that there is only one God
(they view the trinity as being three Gods), and he is very impersonal. Also similar to Christians in the area of
philosophy, they believe that reality exists in both natural and supernatural,
and that knowledge comes both from science and our thoughts, though more so on
the second, as the basis for their philosophies came from the Greek
philosophers. Islamic morals are
determined by God, but not his character.
He decides what is right and wrong, even though those same ethics don’t
always apply to him. Also, they believe
that our actions redefine morality. Their views on how life began are that the world was created by God in a
period of 6-8 days, and all but a small faction disagrees with the theory of
evolution.
Secular
Humanism
Before
I started this class, I didn’t know very much about Secular Humanism, other
than some of the very basic ideas. This
isn’t something you really learn much about unless you take a class like the
one I’m in, so maybe this will help you understand their beliefs better if you
didn’t already know anything about them. Their beliefs on the existence of God are that
he doesn’t exist but is simply a figment of our imagination–something we made
up in order to try to explain the existence of the universe. Instead, they believe that we (humans) are
the ultimate source of knowledge and only we can solve our own problems, create
our own futures, save the earth, etc. Their philosophies claim that there is no supernatural, only the natural
– the things we can feel, see, hear, taste, and smell. Matter is all that exists, and it is always
changing, evolving to make things even better than before. They believe that truth is only found in what
can be seen and is grounded in science.
The Secular Humanist view of right and wrong is that they are
relative. Nothing is really right or
wrong, and each individual determines his or her ethical code by their
experiences. There is no God or other
“higher power” other than ourselves on which to base our ethics. Also, since there is no God to have created
the universe, they believe that life came about through spontaneous
generation–the evolutionary theory that life came about spontaneously from
non-living matter by a natural, random process–and that it continues to change
(evolve), getting better and better over time.
They also rely heavily on natural selection (nature selects favorable
characteristics of an organism and eliminates the others), the struggle for
existence (only the best-equipped organisms will survive), beneficial mutation
(genetic mutation adds characteristics that will help an organism survive),
adaption (slight changes in an organism that help it survive in a certain
climate, area, etc.), and the fossil record (evidence found in fossils).
Check
back to find out about Marxist-Leninism, Cosmic Humanism, and Postmodernism!
Comma
Queen
Sources:
“Understanding
the Times: A Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews (Revised 2nd
Edition)” by David A. Noebel
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