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James Sire’s Seven Basic Worldview Questions

James W. Sire, "Camel, Kangaroo and Elephant" in Naming the Elephant (December 15, 2014), pp. 20-1.
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Another way to get at what a worldview is is to see it as our essential, rock-bottom answers to the following seven questions:

  1. What is prime reality-the really real? To this we might answer God, or the gods, or the material cosmos.
  2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
    Here our answers point to whether we see the world as created or autonomous, as chaotic or orderly, as matter or spirit, or whether we emphasize our subjective, personal relationship to the world or its objectivity apart from us.
  3. What is a human being? To this we might answer a highly complex machine, a sleeping god, a person made in the image of God, a “naked ape.”
  4. What happens to persons at death? Here we might reply personal extinction, or transformation to a higher state, or reincarnation, or departure to a shadowy existence on “the other side.”
  5. Why is it possible to know anything at all? Sample answers include the idea that we are made in the image of an all-knowing God or that consciousness and rationality developed under the contingencies of survival in a long process of evolution.
  6. How do we know what is right and wrong? Again, perhaps we are made in the image of a God whose character is good; or right and wrong are determined by human choice alone or what feels good; or the notions simply developed under an impetus toward cultural or physical survival.
  7. What is the meaning of human history? To this we might answer, to realize the purposes of God or the gods, to make a paradise on earth, to prepare a people for a life in community with a loving and holy God, and so forth.

James Sire on Worldviews and the Really Real

James Sire, Naming the Elephant (December 31, 2014), p. 14.
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Four important revisions to my own definition of worldview were in order. First was a recognition that a worldview is not just a set of basic concepts but a fundamental orientation of the heart. Second was an explicit insistence that at the deepest root of a worldview is its commitment to and understanding of the “really real.” Third was a consideration of behavior in the determination of what one’s own or another’s worldview really is. Fourth was a broader understanding of how worldviews are grasped as story, not just as abstract propositions.