Have you ever read one of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) books? The basic idea behind them is ingenious. Rather than telling a story from a traditional third-person perspective, with a linear storyline and a pre-determined ending, a CYOA book has an “interactive storyline” in which the reader acts as the main character and determines the plot by making decisions at key points. CYOA books are sometimes called “game books” because reading one is like playing a game. Each book has many possible endings—some happy, some not so happy—but the outcome always depends crucially on your choices.
For example, on one page of a CYOA book you might find a belligerent goblin standing in your way. Do you try to flatter him into letting you pass or do you use the mysterious magic potion you picked up on page 12? If you choose the flattery strategy, you turn to page 22; if the potion, you turn instead to page 31. On one of these two pages, the adventure continues unabated. On the other page, things pan out a whole lot better for the hook-nosed green dude than for you. (Now you’re dying to know which page was which. Exciting stuff, isn’t it?)
This book is similar to a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book in some ways and very different in other ways. The similarity is that it’s not meant to be read sequentially from cover to cover. (Please don’t try to do that—you’ll find it very confusing!) Instead, you’re invited to make key decisions or choices at a number of points in order to determine the outcome. It’s not really a “game book,” but there’s still a sense in which you’re a “player.” How things turn out in the end really depends on you.
I’ll be the first to admit that this book may not be quite as exciting and entertaining as a CYOA book, but it deals with something far more important—one might even say infinitely more important. I hope you’ll agree once you get into it. In this book, rather than choosing an adventure, you’ll end up choosing a worldview.
What in the World Is a Worldview?
You may have come across the word worldview before, but don’t be put off if you haven’t. I’ll try to define the term clearly and explain why it’s such an important concept.
Just as the word itself suggests, a worldview is an overall view of the world. It’s not a physical view of the world, like the sight of planet Earth you might get from an orbiting space station. Rather, it’s a philosophical view of the world—and not just of our planet, but of all of reality. A worldview is an all-encompassing perspective on everything that exists and matters to us.
Your worldview represents your most fundamental beliefs and assumptions about the universe you inhabit. It reflects how you would answer all the “big questions” of human existence, the fundamental questions we ask about life, the universe, and everything.
Is there a God? If so, what is God like and how do I relate to God? If there isn’t a God, does it matter? What is truth and can anyone really know the truth anyway? Where did the universe come from and where is it going—if anywhere? What’s the meaning of life? Does my life have a purpose—and, if so, what is it? What am I supposed to do with my life? What does it mean to live a good life? Does it really matter in the end whether or not I live a good life? Is there life after death? Are humans basically just smart apes with superior hygiene and fashion sense—or is there more to us than that?
You get the idea. Your worldview directly influences how you answer those kinds of big questions—or how you would answer them if you were asked and gave them some thought.
Worldviews are like belly buttons. Everyone has one, but we don’t talk about them very often. Or perhaps it would be better to say that worldviews are like cerebellums: everyone has one and we can’t live without them, but not everyone knows that he has one.
A worldview is as indispensable for thinking as an atmosphere is for breathing. You can’t think in an intellectual vacuum any more than you can breathe without a physical atmosphere. Most of the time, you take the atmosphere around you for granted: you look through it rather than at it, even though you know it’s always there. Much the same goes for your worldview: normally you look through it rather than directly at it. It’s essential, but it usually sits in the background of your thought.
Your worldview shapes and informs your experiences of the world around you. Like a pair of spectacles with colored lenses, it affects
what you see and how you see it. Depending on the “color” of the lenses, you see some things more easily, while other things are de-emphasized or distorted. In some cases, you don’t see things at all.
Here are a few examples to illustrate how your worldview affects the way you see things. Suppose that one day a close friend tells you that she recently met with a spiritualist who put her in touch with a loved one who died ten years ago. Later that day, you read an article about a statue of the Virgin Mary that witnesses claim to have seen weeping blood. You also hear a news story on the radio about possible signs of complex organic life discovered on Mars. Your worldview—your background assumptions about God, the origin and nature of the universe, human beginnings, life after death, and so forth—strongly influences how you interpret these reports and react to them.
Worldviews also largely determine people’s opinions on matters of ethics and politics. What you think about abortion, euthanasia, same-sex relationships, public education, economic policy, foreign aid, the use of military force, environmentalism, animal rights, genetic enhancement, and almost any other major issue of the day depends on your underlying worldview more than anything else.
As you can see, then, worldviews play a central and defining role in our lives. They shape what we believe and what we’re willing to believe, how we interpret our experiences, how we behave in response to those experiences, and how we relate to others.
I hope by now you have a good sense of what a worldview is and why it’s so significant. As I said earlier, this book is about choosing a worldview rather than choosing an adventure (although I like to think there’s something quite adventurous about reflecting deeply on all the big questions). Strictly speaking, however, in this book you’re not so much choosing a worldview as identifying your worldview, because you already have a worldview, even if you don’t realize it. So one of the purposes of this book is to help you identify and clarify your worldview and its implications.
Nevertheless, what you read here may also prompt you to reconsider your worldview—perhaps even to change it. It isn’t easy for someone to change his or her worldview—it can be like relocating to another continent, intellectually speaking—but it can and does happen. For example, the novelist C. S. Lewis famously moved from an Atheist worldview to a Theist worldview, partly through discussions with his colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien. But even if you stick with your current worldview, this book will give you the opportunity to explore a number of alternative worldviews, all of which are (or have been) held by real people at some time and place.
Here are the main goals of this book:
- To help you identify and clarify your worldview.
- To encourage you to consider the big questions and to think through some of the implications of various answers.
- To help you appreciate that there are important differences between worldviews—and that not all worldviews are created equal! (I’ll say more about this last point in a moment.)
How Does the Book Work?
You’ll be presented with a series of questions that are designed to be answered yes or no. (Don’t worry if you’re not really sure how to answer a particular question. Just go with the answer that best reflects your current beliefs, the answer that seems to you most likely to be true. You can always go back and choose a different answer later if you want to.) The question will be stated in a box at the top of the page, and the rest of the page will give an explanation of the question to make sure you understand exactly what you’re being asked.
Depending on your answer to the question, you’ll be directed to another page, where you’ll find one of the following:
- A further question, to narrow down the remaining options.
- A brief commentary on your answer and its implications.
- A final worldview page.
The last of these will have “Worldview” in the page heading. If you land on one of these pages, you’ve hit the end of the trail you have followed. There you’ll find a summary of the type of worldview you have based on all the answers you gave, along with some commentary designed to provoke further thought. You’ll also have the option to go back up the trail, so to speak, by returning to one of the earlier question pages.
As I mentioned at the beginning, one of the features of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book is that not all of the possible storylines have happy endings. Often a poor choice leads to a short and sticky end. Your choices have consequences—sometimes
fatal consequences! In a manner of speaking, the same goes for the different outcomes in this book. Some worldviews have more serious problems than others. Some walk with a pronounced limp. Some have failing organs. Some are mortally wounded. A few are simply “dead on arrival”! In each case, I’ll point out a few of these problems, but I’ll leave it to you to make the final diagnosis and prognosis.
Let’s go back to the encounter with the goblin for a moment. In fact, going back is exactly what you would do, I suspect, if you made a poor choice the first time you met the goblin. I know I would! If I got squished, I’d flip back to the earlier page and take a different path. I’m pretty sure that’s what most readers of CYOA books do when their stories come to abrupt and undesirable ends. Is that cheating? Not at all. It’s just getting your money’s worth from the book!
I want to encourage you to approach this book in much the same way. If you don’t like the outcome of your answers to the questions, please feel free to flip back to the previous question, or to an even earlier one, and follow a different path. I want you to get your money’s worth! In fact, I hope you’ll be intrigued enough to explore every path in the book, along with the worldviews at the ends of all those paths, because that will help you to gain an even better understanding of your own worldview.
There’s one other issue I should mention before we get started. Since everyone has a worldview, I have my own worldview, too, of course. I’m not going to tell you which worldview that is, but I haven’t tried to disguise it. You should be able to figure it out by exploring the different “storylines” in the book and reflecting on my comments on each worldview.
Does that mean the whole book is biased? Well, sure! But if you think about it, that’s unavoidable. Since everyone has a worldview, everyone has a bias. All of us are naturally biased toward our own worldviews, and all of us tend to interpret and evaluate the world in accordance with our worldviews. So do I have a bias? Yes, of course—but so do you!
The real issue isn’t whether we have biases—we all do—but whether we’re aware of them and able to think critically about them. In a certain sense, each of us can step into someone else’s worldview, just as we can step into someone else’s house, to examine it “from the inside” and to compare it with our own. I’ve tried to represent other worldviews fairly in this book: to summarize them accurately and to be realistic about their strengths and weaknesses. Even if you think I’ve failed in some cases, I hope you will nonetheless learn something useful along the way and benefit from thinking about these important matters.
No doubt this book will raise a number of questions in your mind. I’ve tried to anticipate the most common questions and provide answers in the appendix.
Well, that’s more than enough introduction!
Are you ready to begin the “adventure”? If so, just turn the page.
Introduction from What's Your Worldview?: An Interactive Approach to Life's Big Questions James N. Anderson