The answers you give to these questions help to shape your worldview. A worldview is the way in which a person sees and explain the world and his place in it. Your worldview not only affects the way you think. It also affects the way you act or behave. Your worldview shapes the quality of your life.
In the long history of
mankind, there have been many different ways of explaining the world, how it
came about, how it works, and what is man’s place in it.
Some people have seen
the world as a mysterious place, with dark and evil forces at work. In such a
worldview, a persons’s life is ruled by superstition and fear.
Others have seen the
world as a bright, rich and beautiful place. They do not show concern about how
it came about or about what will happen to it. They are happy ‘to make the most
of it’, to eat, drink and enjoy life. If they do think of life and death at
all, they might just say , “We live and die and nothing causes our death except
time.”
Some people have seen
the universe as a battleground of good and evil, of light and darkness, of
positive and negative. Among some Chinese, for examples, there are ideas of yin
and yang.
Yang is light and heat and goodness. Yin is dark and cold and damp and bad. In some
forms of Zoroastrian religion, there is Ahura Mazda, the force of good,
battling with Angra Mainyu, the force of evil, for control of the world.
Some people get their
worldview from religious which hold that there is a creator or maker of the
universe or a supreme being. Religious differ about the nature of this supreme
being. Some say this being has absolute power – he can do whatever he wishes
and no other has a share in his power. Others associate this being with other
fods, demons and spirits.
Nowadays, many people
have turned away from religious and a belief in God. Many feel that the idea of
God and of a creator is an invention of man’s imagination anyway. They feel
that man has the power and the right to decide what is best for him. Such
people are called atheists, agnostics or humanists. An atheist is one who denies the existence of
God. An agnostic is one who says that he does not know whether God exists or
not. He may even go further and say that he does not care. He is really quite
close to the atheist. A humanist (who may be an atheist or an agnostic) insists
that human beings along must decide what is best for them for there is no such
thing as Divine laws.
At the same time as
they turn to humanism, many now turn to ‘Science’ and the scientific method for
their understanding of the world and man’s place in it. They may have a notion
of science as something exact and precise and of the scientific method – of
gathering data, experimentation, observation and deduction – as the only way of
gaining knowledge, of determining what is true and what is false.
Some people pick and
choose to form their own worldview. For some questions they may turn to a
religion, especially in times of distress. For other answers they may turn to
an astrologer, the horoscope in their daily or weekly newspaper, a popular
guru, or a fashionable ideology like Marxism. For certain questions they would
invoke the name of science. And so on.
From this brief look at various worldview, it would seem that human beings as a whole are totally mixed up and confused without any hope of finding out what is right or true. It may seem that we are grouping in the dark, not really knowing where we are, from where we came and where we are going. In this situation we may well wonder if there is any way of knowing what is true from what is false.
Clearly, all the ways of looking at the world
cannot all be true. Some appear to have some things in common but each is
different from the other in important ways.
Of any worldview, we may ask:
No single person on his own, no matter how clever he is, can give complete, valid and satisfying answers to the questions about the origins of the world and man’s place in it, about life and destiny. No group of persons can do so either. For example, all the knowledge of the world and the universe amassed by scientists throughout the ages is knowledge of only a small part of reality. However much scientists in the future may come to know, there will always be a point where they must say, ‘We do not know.’ From the standpoint of science, the universe is like an old book the first and last pages of which have been lost. Neither the beginning nor the end is known. Thus, the worldview of science is a knowledge of the part, not of the whole.
Science, as the world is now widely understood, acquaints us with the situation of some parts of the universe; it cannot explain the essential character of the whole universe, its origin or its destiny. The scientist’s worldview is like the knowledge about the elephant gained by those who touched it in the dark. The one who felt the elephant’s ear suppose the animal to be shaped lie a fan; the one who felt its leg supposed it to be shaped like a column; and the one who felt the back supposed it to be shaped like a throne. Science it has been said is like a powerful searchlight in the long winter night, lighting up a small area in its beam but unable to shed light beyond its border. This in not to pronounce on its usefulness or otherwise; it is only to say that it is limited.
Fortunately, in our quest for a true and valid worldview, human beings do have a special gift or power – the power of reason and logic. Of course, we must realize that this power is in itself limited: it is like a precision balance which you might use for weighing gold but you would be vain and foolish to think of using it to weigh mountains. Still, if reason is properly used, it could point to some of the real answers about our place in this world. At the very least, this power of reason could be used to show which theory or which worldview is false or inadequate.
We shall thus try to use reason to answer the most
important of the questions listed at the very beginning of this section, which
is: Where do we come from?