Changes in the Worldview

WHAT IS WORLDVIEW?

In basic terms world view is a concept where a person/individual or a group or a culture reacts or interacts with the world using different ideas and frameworks. Worldviews forms social values and these values create social or individual behavior. These behaviors further create different cultures. So, basically worldview of a particular culture may be different from another culture. Worldview has changed during the past a lot of times. During the premodern era the worldview had a metaphysical concept meaning the era was focused on spiritual beliefs and as the era changed, then came the modern era. As the beliefs changed in modern era so did the worldview. During the modern era society started changing their believes and dropped the idea of spiritual beliefs to humanity, here and now and physical reality. Then came the era which we call postmodern era which is the system of thoughts and beliefs being accepted and embraced after the modern age and it focused on humanism, science education etc.

There were a lot of changes in the western worldview over time as there are a lot of factors that help the worldview to change, for example:

1. Social systems
2. Political and economic system
3. Culture

The change in the western worldview could be categorized in 3 eras, the pre-modern era, the modern era and the post-modern era. There were a timely change in the worldview of how the society thinks and what does it accept which led to the change in worldviews.

According to one author Christianity changed the pagan word because Christians were faithful and were even willing to die for their beliefs and morality. And thus, even Constantine legalized Christianity in AD 313. Once it was legalized chritians started following their beliefs, one of which was human being were create by the image of god.

After the middle age, it was the beginning of the era what we call “renaissance”. It basically started when European scholar discovered classic documents and new idea to look at the world. Few events such as the Black death also brought changes to the worldview, people start believing that the cause was a result of the alignment of planets and some believes that it was a punishment of god and those who survived had a chance to leave their farmland and move to cities which in today’s era we call urbanization. After the renaissance or modern era came the modernism and it rejected the post-modernism as it failed to answer humanities most troublesome problems.

The objective of ethics according the Christian ethic is that few standards are visible throughout human attitude towards morality. Even though secular philosophers treat all moral ethics as relative, even they have some ethical values such as love, justice and courage.

The basic importance of ethics to worldview is that ethics always comes with philosophies and philosophies are shaped by the worldview. So, to create ethics we use philosophies and to shape philosophies we need to understand the worldview.

The solution for human’s ethical dilemmas can affect one’s worldview. The human in today’s world are left with two choices between two evils:

1. Believe at least some people will believes the values at judgments to be objective
2. Or no one believe it.

Selecting the second option means debunking all the moral and ethical values which is a new point of view and lead to a new worldview.

The common aspect between the book and the articles is that all the author are conveying a message about worldview, morals and ethics and the transition of one worldview to another over a period. The ways of conveying the message are different but few things are similar between the book and the article which are morality, ethics etc.

C.S Lewis in his book ‘The Abolition of Man’ has a bit different approach to explain this concept. He uses human and nature to explain the worldview and ethics. He also explains the concept of ‘Tao’, a Chinese word for the realm of objective value as the basis for traditional morality. (Lewis, 1943)

References

• Lewis, C. S. (1986). The abolition of man, or, Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools. Retrieved January 16, 2017

• Christian Ethics. (n.d.). Retrieved January 16, 2017, from http://www.allaboutworldview.org/christian-ethics.html

• Zacharia, R. (2016, December 20). The Death of Truth and a Postmortem. Retrieved January 16, 2017, from http://rzim.org/global-blog/the-death-of-truth-and-a-postmortem/

• Anderson, K. (2016, August 07). Worldviews Through History – Compared to a Christian View. Retrieved January 16, 2017, from www.probe.org/worldviews-through-history/

• Smilde, A. (2015, June 3). LEWISIANA: Summary of C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. Retrieved January 16, 2017, from http://lewisiana.nl/abolsum/index.html