‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.’ Romans 1.18-21 (NIV)
I still remember the first time I was confronted with those words. In response to a question from a university friend about the fate of those who have never heard about Jesus I breezily asserted that, since God is good and loving, he would definitely save all of them. An older, wiser Christian took me aside and simply pointed me to Romans 1: ‘since what may be known about God is plain to them…people are without excuse.’ To be honest, I didn’t instinctively warm to the idea that everyone who denies the existence of God is suppressing the truth by their wickedness. Rather, I was tempted to avoid the claims of Romans 1 by finding a different explanation for unbelief. What I’ve only come to understand recently is that the uncritical adoption of the concept of worldview risks succumbing, even if inadvertently, to precisely that temptation.
In his Meditations, René Descartes concludes that his arguments for God’s existence are such that he ‘should regard the existence of God as having at least the same level of certainty as I have hitherto attributed to the truths of mathematics.’ Whatever the merits of his (or any other) arguments for the existence of God, the chief obstacle today to drawing a simple equivalence between the truth of God’s existence and the truths of mathematics is empirical - everyone believes that 2+2 =4, but lots of people don’t believe that God exists. What explains the difference?
Paul’s argument in Romans provides one explanation. Despite God’s ‘eternal power and divine nature…[being] clearly seen,’ human beings ‘suppress the truth by their wickedness,’ not wanting to glorify God or give him thanks. Human beings are able to suppress clear and evident truths (that which is ‘plain to them’) when they want to. Consider the crowd at a soccer match. Ask any fan what time kickoff is and you’ll get the same answer (just as in the case of the truths of mathematics).
But ask a fan whether the last-minute penalty that decided the match was correctly awarded, and their answer will likely depend on whether the decision went for or against their team. It is basically irrelevant how ‘clear-cut’ the decision in question was - fans of the team that lost out will insist they were robbed. Human beings see what they want to see, even when the truth of the matter is plain to them. In order to explain disagreement about God’s existence, we don’t need to posit some way in which the truth of God’s existence is more obscure than the truth of mathematics. We simply need to recognise humanity’s extraordinary capacity to blind ourselves to inconvenient truths.
Immanuel Kant, however, offered a different explanation. Aware of the irresolvable disagreement about the existence of God, Kant was concerned that the insistence that one could use human reason to discover the truth about God’s existence was giving reason a bad name. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that the question of God’s existence cannot be resolved through philosophical argument (using what Kant calls ‘speculative reason’) and that attempts to do so are an example of ‘the glittering pretensions of reason to extend its territory beyond all the bounds of experience’.
Kant’s argument, and the history of modern philosophy, turns on his response to this perceived overreach of human reason. His extraordinarily influential thesis is that reason cannot resolve the question of God’s existence because reason only works within ‘the bounds of experience’. In particular, reason can only deliver truths about the appearance of things, not about things as they are in themselves (a reality that is unknown and unknowable). As Kant himself writes (in characteristically dense prose):
all synthetic cognition a priori is possible only by the fact that it expresses the formal conditions of a possible experience, and all principles are therefore only of immanent validity, i.e., they are related solely to objects of empirical cognition, or appearances. Thus through transcendental procedures aiming at a theology of mere speculative reason nothing is accomplished.
To return to soccer, imagine that instead of going to the match in person spectators are only able to watch on their own at home on a black and white television set, without any commentary. And now consider the claim ‘Manchester United are playing from left to right, and Liverpool from right to left.’ This is a claim about the match as it appears to the spectators, and given everyone is watching the same feed, there would be unanimous agreement about the truth of the statement. But crucially, this is not a claim about the reality of the match - if the camera were to be positioned on the other side of the pitch it would be Liverpool playing left to right and Manchester United from right to left. For Kant, the truths of mathematics are this type of claim - they describe the world as it appears to (all of) us and therefore are met with unanimous assent.
Now consider the claim ‘Manchester United are playing in their home red kit, while Liverpool are playing in their blue away kit.’ Unlike which team is playing from left to right, this is a claim about the match as it really is - one team really is playing in their first choice red, while the other is playing in an alternative kit. But the spectators watching on the black and white screen cannot know whether it’s true or not - in fact it is easy to imagine them arguing about which team got to wear their preferred red kit. This, for Kant, is parallel to the truth of God’s existence - given it is beyond our direct empirical experience of the world it is unknowable, and therefore disagreement is to be expected.
This is the Kantian alternative to Paul’s argument in Romans 1 - there’s disagreement about the truth of God’s existence (unlike the truths of mathematics) not because humans in wickedness suppress the plain truth of His existence, but because the existence of God is beyond the scope of human reason, which only has purchase on the appearance of things.
Paul and Kant thus provide us not just with two different answers to the question ‘why do people disagree about God’s existence?’ but in the process give us two fundamentally different accounts of how we relate to reality. On the Scriptural account we are, so to speak, ‘at the game’: we have access to reality (including the reality of God) such that we can have knowledge of the world as it really is. On the Kantian account we are always ‘watching TV’: we do not have direct access to reality and so we can only know how things appear to us, not what they are really like.
It is as part of this Kantian account that the idea of worldview has its historical origins; in fact, the concept and language of worldview was actually coined by Kant himself (as Weltanschauung). The connection makes sense on a linguistic level: how does the concept of worldview differ to the simple concept of view? The qualifier ‘world’ suggests that our view is all-encompassing and in some sense inescapable - and this is precisely Kant’s thought. For Kant, we cannot get past our view, cannot move from reality as it appears to us to reality as it truly is. That is what makes our “view” a “worldview.”
To see how this works, come back with me to the soccer match. When everyone is at the game in person (the world according to the Scriptures) people do have different beliefs - some think it was a penalty, some don’t. But while there may be no neutral ground on which to stand and consider together what is true (everyone supports one team or the other) there is common ground: we are all in the same place watching the same match, perhaps even from neighbouring seats. I might have a particular view of the match and I might support one team rather than the other, but that doesn’t isolate me from the other spectators, or determine my entire access to and outlook on the game: in short, my view is not really a ‘worldview.’
In the world according to Kant, however, everyone is watching the game at home on their own. My access to the match is mediated entirely through the screen: my ‘view’ now becomes the all-encompassing determinant of what I think and what I know. And while Kant himself insists that everyone is watching the same camera feed (human reason delivers objective and universal truth about how the world appears to us), it’s hard to see how I can know that is the case. After all, I can’t see anyone else’s screen: how do I know that they’re not watching a camera feed from the other side of the stadium? In this world it’s not just that there’s no neutral ground from which to consider what we know to be true; now there’s no common ground either, with everyone in their own coherent, independent bubble, staring at their own screen. And it is on this account of our relation to the world that the concept of worldview comes into its own. My view about whether God exists isn’t a belief that we can reason about together from the starting point of our common experience of reality. It’s an important part of my worldview, from which you are sealed off, since you cannot know how the world appears to me. The best you can do is describe your worldview (from which I am sealed off) in the hope that it sounds more attractive.
The concept of worldview is not neutral. It finds its historical origins and its intellectual home in the Kantian account of how we relate to reality, which, as we have seen, is fundamentally opposed to the Scriptural account given in Romans 1. One may, on such grounds, think it best to stop talking about a ‘Christian worldview’ altogether, speaking instead simply of Christian faith. Certainly, an undiscerning use of worldview risks leading Christians into patterns of thought and speech shaped more by our post-Kantian intellectual environment than the words of Scripture.
With that in mind, I want to propose two tests for the Christian use of worldview, that serve to check whether its use has led us to fall prey to the Kantian account of our relation to reality.
Come back with me to the soccer match one more time, and consider the fan who loudly insists it was not a penalty, despite seeing perfectly clearly that it was a foul. We would consider that fan to be morally culpable, and his actions to be morally blameworthy. He should have been able to acknowledge and speak the truth, but instead he has chosen to blind himself to the reality of what happened. By contrast, consider the fan, stuck at home watching the match on a black and white TV, who decides that it was Manchester United who played in their home kit, when in fact it was Liverpool. She’s wrong, but since she only had limited access to the game it’s not really her fault.
When we think and speak about ‘different worldviews’ in the context of evangelism, the danger is it suggests that those who don’t believe in God are in the same position as the second fan - they’re wrong, but since they only know how reality appears to them it’s not really their fault. Implicitly, we begin to think that unbelievers sin (by acting towards others in immoral ways), but that unbelief itself is not sin.
Think like that for long enough, and the words of Scripture in Romans 1 start to become offensive and incomprehensible. For Paul, it is because ‘what may be known about God is plain to [all], since God has made it plain to them’, because we know what is true and real, that all are without excuse. Like the fan in denial, it is morally blameworthy to suppress the truth about God’s existence. The concept of worldview (and the closely related idea of ‘social imaginary’ in the work of Charles Taylor) must not be end up functioning as excuses for the widespread unbelief we encounter - rather they should serve as helpful reminders that the sin of unbelief is not confined to the wills of particular individuals but has become embedded in social structures which shape and condition belief.
This might sound like an odd question, but think about what is implied when we speak in contexts of formation or discipleship about adopting or developing a Christian worldview. Such language can bring to mind the idea of putting on a pair of glasses so that we might come to see everything through the particular lens of Christianity. Now on the post-Kantian account of our relation to reality this is exactly the right metaphor. Since we cannot know things in themselves we should always think of ourselves as wearing glasses which lead us to see the world in a particular light. The challenge of Christian discipleship is then to make sure we choose the right (Christian) pair of glasses.
However, on the Scriptural account the metaphor gets things precisely backwards. The task of Christian discipleship is not to adopt a Christian worldview by putting on a particular pair of glasses but to take off our glasses and see the world as it truly is. Christianity is not a particular way of looking at the world but the truth about reality, a truth that is knowable by all. We must not lose sight of the fact that the prize of Christian discipleship is not a coherent, comforting worldview but to see and know the world truly: not from our particular angle, not in black and white, but as it really is, in all its colourful splendor.