What Should I Teach My Students About Worldviews?

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What Should I Teach My Students About Worldviews?

June 2, 2025

Question about how to go about teaching students about worldviews, what a worldview is, how to identify one, how to show that the Christian worldview is better than others, and recommended resources on the topic of worldviews.

* I’m at a loss as to how to go about teaching my students about worldviews. What is a worldview, how do you identify one, how do you show that the Christian worldview is better than others, and what are your recommended resources on this topic?

Transcript

This is Amy Hall and Greg Koukl, and you're listening to Stand to Reason's hashtag SDRask Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. And Greg, we have a question about worldview to start with today.

This comes from Caleb. I'm a youth pastor, and I've recently realized the importance of the worldviews of my students. But I am at a loss on how to do this.

How to go about it. So what is a worldview? How do you identify one? How do you show Christian worldviews are better than others, and what are your recommended resources on this topic? Well, that's a really important question. And I wrote the book Story of Reality to characterize the Christian worldview.

Now, I think the word worldview is an important one because it signifies that when we're talking about that thing, we're talking about a way the world actually is. It's a viewer, an understanding of the way the world actually is. So it's at least meant to describe the exterior world, not our interior world, not our truth or our view.

I mean, obviously, we have our own views about it, but our views are meant to describe what's out there. Okay. And in the first chapter, I think of the story of reality, I ask a question.

And the question is, what is Christianity? And some will say, well, it's a religion or it's a way of living life satisfying and in a satisfying way. They might say it's not a religion, it's a relationship. But my point is that even though those are true, these don't really get at the heart of it.

At the heart of it is Christianity is a view of reality. All right. And in fact, that's the way every religion is and every kind of broad, we can call it metaphysical philosophy.

Metaphysics is just the nature of reality, basically. A metaphysical view tells you what is real. All right.

So a worldview is like that. Now, in the book, I use two kind of metaphors or analogs, analogies to help describe what a worldview is. I actually don't think it's those two are the best ones, but I start out with, which I will give you in a moment, but I start out with a puzzle.

Okay. So a worldview is a picture of reality, like a puzzle properly assembled with all the right pieces is a picture. But you have to have all the right pieces, obviously, and you can't have pieces from other worldviews, puzzles, so to speak, mixed in.

And this is why it's important to have all the pieces put together so you get a clear picture of it. That's what I do in the story of reality, give the big picture of Christianity. But it's curious, though, for me that there are Christians, for example, that'll say, well, I'm a Christian, but I believe in reincarnation.

And when I hear that, I understand that they haven't put their puzzle pieces together. They may have a lot of odds and ends there, Jesus and Paul and the New Covenant and Moses and the Ten Commandments and odds and ends. But they never put them together because if they had, they would realize that reincarnation doesn't do any work for us.

The peace doesn't fit in our puzzle. So in this analogy, a worldview is like a puzzle. It is a coherent characterization of a picture of reality.

And when you put the pieces together properly, you get that full, robust picture and see how it all works together. Now, in the story of reality, I trade largely on another metaphor, and that is story. And stories have four parts.

They have a beginning. They have a conflict. They have conflict resolution, and they have a restoration kind of at the end.

And so in a sense, the story of reality, the biblical account is an account of how history unfolds with a purpose, like a story. And we have a beginning in the beginning God, and then we have conflict, you know, maggots in the heap of trouble, and then conflict resolution ultimately through Jesus, and then final restoration through the final resurrection to reward or punishment and everything is made new. So that's another way of looking at it, but the problem with using story as a metaphor, and I clarify this in the book, is that most stories are not true.

But our story doesn't start out once upon a time or something like that, because it's not meant to be understood as a myth or a fairy tale. It is meant to be an accurate characterization of reality. Now, whether or not it is, is another question, we have to, in a moment, but I'm using, I'm just trying to help people conceptualize, in this case, Caleb, what a worldview is.

Here's the third way of looking at it that I actually think is the best. A worldview is kind of like a map. Now, if you think about a map, a map is meant to match the contours of the real world.

So we have a map of the LA basin, for example, with the freeways and everything, and there's a correspondence between what's on the piece of paper and what's on the ground. And if the map is a good one, there's a very close correlation. And so you can use the map to navigate.

I'm in GPS. I mean, this is a very ordinary concept. People get it.

But if the map is not a good one, it's not going to correlate. And so therefore you're going to get lost. You might drive off a cliff or something like that.

So the worldview is like a map of the world. I don't mean the globe. I mean, the world writ large, all that exists.

It's a characterization of the way the world really is. We're back to that statement now. But it is useful if it's sound for navigating.

And so these three metaphors will help maybe Caleb explain the notion of worldview. Now, Christianity offers a view like that. It's a picture of reality made up of pieces that we have to have all the right pieces put together in the right way.

And not adding pieces that don't belong. All right. It's also a story.

It has a beginning, a middle and an end. We have conflict conflict resolution, restoration, that kind of thing. And that's a good metaphor because there is a drama that unfolds here.

But this is a true story. At least that's the claim. And then the third way is to think of worldview as a map.

And if the worldview is accurate, it fits the topography of reality well. All right. And you can use it to navigate.

And I think all of these things are true of Christianity that it fits each one of those characterizations and especially the navigation part. But all worldviews are expected to be used for navigation. Now, if your worldview is like materialism, there's nothing about molecules in motion.

There's not much to navigate. You know, you can navigate the physical world, learning about it in the physical laws. But when it comes to meaning and morality, destiny, all these ultimate things that people really care about, there's nothing there.

It's just a matter of what you decide for yourself. So that's what that metaphysical view of reality dictates in terms of human behavior. Now, the next question is, how do we know which view is true? Remember I said that using the map metaphor, a worldview is meant to correspond to reality, to the world the way it actually is.

Well, if we can make it, if our view is true, then we should be able to see how the pieces of our worldview are touchstones to reality. There's a fit there. This is why Christianity being a religion grounded in history is really important because just take the life of Christ.

With the life of Christ, you've got a man who claimed to be God who came to earth and did stuff that people saw and recorded. And if the things that were recorded actually happened, not just the teachings of Jesus, but the miracles and especially the resurrection, well, that becomes, that's a touchstone between the claims and the way the world is. And that's, by the way, something historically determined about Jesus' life.

And that is one argument for the truthfulness of Christianity because we have a very reliable history in the primary source documents of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So what we're doing is we're trying to do a correspondence between the claims of the worldview, the alleged map, and the way the world actually is. Now, let me give you an example of how this doesn't work.

In other words, how you can use it to falsify a worldview. So atheism says there is no God, okay, but atheists complain characteristically about the problem of evil. All right, well, wait a minute.

What is the problem of evil? Well, the world's not the way it's supposed to be. Okay, I got that. But you can't have a way the world's not supposed to be unless you have a way the world is supposed to be, and it's not.

And you can't have a way the world is supposed to be without a supposer. In other words, for there to be a violation of the rules of morality, there's got to be rules of morality and there's got to be a rulemaker. And I can't go into depth on it here.

I do this very carefully in the book Street Smarts. But it turns out that the existence of evil in the world is one of the best evidences for God. Now, in our worldview, we believe in evil.

Our whole story is about evil. So our worldview matches the way the world actually is, and we have a solution for it. In the atheistic worldview, though, molecules in motion, there is no place.

There's no way to make any sense of objective evil in the world. It's not in their system. It doesn't fit in their worldview.

Okay, now you've got a detail of the world that everybody knows about, no matter where you lived or when you lived in the world, that the world is broken, that there's evil in the world, that atheistic worldview has to deny. And therefore, there's not a fit on their map. There is something in the world that doesn't occur on their map map and it's big.

Okay, so this is evidence their view isn't true because their view doesn't fit the way the world is. Now, those touch points, there are lots of different ones people can explore, but I'm just helping Caleb and the rest to conceptualize this notion. But if you want to start with the book of worldview, it isn't a book about worldviews in general.

It's a book about the Christian worldview and some of the reasons why we have strong touch points with reality, evidencing our worldview is true. I would recommend the story of reality. Now, there is a book on worldviews.

It's not a very big one. And I can't remember. It's one of those books where if you say, okay, here's where I'm starting.

I'm starting with this. Then they say, okay, now turn to page such and so, you know, and because every step that you try to make with the worldview is going to lead you somewhere. And what this author is trying to show, I think his name is Anderson or something.

It's a great book. I've talked about it, but I haven't looked at it in a long time. But is it James Anderson? What's your worldview? Is it this one? Yeah.

Yeah, maybe that's it. Does that look familiar? Yeah. Well, maybe that's, I mean, read the information or Amy.

Well, I'm talking, you read while I talk because what this author does, if it is Anderson, he kind of steps through. Okay, if you say this, Molochus Emotion, Atheism, there's no good. Okay.

Then it goes here, here, here's where you land. Now, here are the problems with that given the nature of reality. Oh, you don't say that you start in someplace else.

Okay, we'll go there. It sounds like that. It sounds like it's this one.

Yeah, it's kind of like make your own story and being type thing. You know, they used to have those books that were popular for a while. But what he's doing is he's just trying to look at the logic.

That's what he says. It's in the mold of the classic, choose your own adventure story. What's your worldview by James Anderson? That I think is the best one strictly on worldview.

And what he is showing is he's trying to build on the notion of coherence of reality. Reality fits together in a certain kind of way. So, and I mean, it actually fits.

And if you have a worldview that is consistent with reality, it's a good worldview, then it's that's also going to fit. But what he's trying to show is like, if you go here, okay, let's go there. And then you got to go here and then you got this takes you to this spot, which seems to be inconsistent with reality.

And for example, there's probably of all the different worldviews he has or he probably has about 15 or 20 of them more than half deny the problem of evil. They're relativistic in their morality. So, you know, right away, if there's a real problem of evil, these guys got it wrong.

It goes through the steps. It'll be a really good education, I think, for the youth, especially very accessible. But so check that book out.

But don't don't neglect the story of reality because that's going to give you our worldview as he does in the end and help them to see how it fits together. Right. You have to do both.

You have to do understand your own worldview. You must do both. You must buy story.

Well, another good book that I thought could be really helpful is Nancy Piercy's Finding Truth because she talks about how, you know, you mentioned the idea that you can't live consistently within a false worldview. You always end up finding something that doesn't fit. And so she talks a lot about how every worldview is based on some kind of ultimate thing, some kind of God, either the true God or something that replaces God.

And what that ends up doing is affecting the entire story of who we are, of what's important to us, of what's gone wrong. And then what happens is they try to fit, they try to fit their story into the, something comes out. It's a force fit.

Something doesn't fit and you can tell. So she kind of helps you learn how to evaluate the worldviews that you encounter. But one of the questions you asked Caleb was, how do you identify one? So if you're trying to find out what someone's worldview is, start with that.

What is ultimate in this universe? Is it God? Is it material? Is it some sort of force? What exactly is it? Who are we? What are we? What's our goal? Where are we headed? What has gone wrong with the world? How do we fix it? How's it going to end? I mean, all these are questions that can help you put together how they view reality, what's important, how we got here, all those kinds of questions. You mentioned Nancy Piercey, who actually curiously wrote the introduction to the story of reality. And she's really on it with the book that you mentioned.

Is it finding truth? Finding truth, yeah. But you mentioned that there's a reason what happens when people get false worldviews, is there are pieces of reality that seem to be obvious elements like morality, for example. And if it doesn't fit, they throw them out.

And this is one thing that Nancy identifies. It's like you can't throw morality out. It's a piece of the world.

And the thing is, the reason we can't live consistently with these false worldviews is because we're not just observers outside somewhere. We're in the world. We experience the world.

And in the tactics book, I talk about an inside-out tactic, which means there are certain understandings or truths that we have inside of us that are going to come out, you know, just in casual conversation, reflection on the world. J. Budzewski has a book titled, What We Cannot, Not No. Because we're made to know these things.

They're built into us. And so if these are things we know about the nature of reality, our worldview has got to incorporate those things. And if they don't incorporate those things, this is a clear indication that our worldview is flawed.

And we have so many things on our website to show how Christianity fits reality. You have one talk called naturalism, bumping into reality. You have pieces on our website called Why God, I think they're titled.

And of course, our entire website has arguments arguing for the Christian worldview. And you can always go look at other people who have different worldviews, find out why they believe what they believe, see what their reasons are. But that's how you evaluate it.

You look at what we've experienced, what we see around us, and you look at these views and see if they fit and see if they can live consistently within that view. And if they can't, then you shouldn't have that view. Something's wrong with the view.

You know, it's just thinking about a teenager's youth group that Caleb is asking about. It might be helpful. Let's say they're driving age.

Okay. So there's a car out front. I'll give you the keys, a full gas, a full tank of gas.

You got money in your pocket, drive to New York City. However, no GPS, no road signs, none of that, no maps. You have to get there.

Well, you realize all the GPS is electronic map. Road signs about that. You can't get anywhere in particular without an understanding of the nature of the terrain.

You can just go, but you can't go to a specific place. And human beings want to go to a specific place. That's the way we're built.

We're teleological. We're purpose-driven. And if we don't have a map of the world that is accurate to the world, that is very difficult for us to do that.

Another thing you mentioned about asking questions of people, there is one question that is a kind of continental divide when it comes to world view. In other words, the continental divide down the spine of the Rockies, water hitting one edge of that divide goes east and the other goes west. And so, you know, this is a decisive factor.

And that question is, does God exist? Because if you say he does not exist, this inexorably takes you in one direction, logically, that is, to certain particulars. And if you say he does, there are more questions to be answered regarding that, but it takes you in a completely different direction. That's why in our survey that we have online where you can ask people questions about their worldview, that's the very first question we have them ask.

Well, thank you so much, Caleb. That was a great question. We're actually a set of questions.

God is through the whole show. That's fantastic. And we'd love to hear from you, if you have a question, just send it on X with the hashtag STRAsk or go to our website at STR.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Cocle for Stand to Reason.