Why Worldviews?

If you’re one of the few listeners who started listening to indoubt from the very beginning, this episode will sound eerily similar to one you’ve heard. That’s because it is. Last year we recorded a two-week series with Steve Kim (an associate at Apologetics Canada) called What Do I Say? The content of these two episodes are still extremely relevant, so that’s why we’re airing them again. The two-week series has everything to do with worldviews and how we, as Christians, engage others with different worldviews. In this first episode, we’ll hear about how Steve dealt with different worldviews growing up, and then he’ll explain what exactly worldviews are, what the Christian worldview is, and then the importance of stretching your mind to actually think through these things. Next week, he’ll get into the three major worldviews of our culture, and then how we can best engage people with them.

Who’s Our Guest?

Steve Kim is a follower of Christ with a heart for apologetics. Steve holds a diploma in Worship Arts and a BA in Biblical Studies from Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, BC. He has completed a master’s degree in Christian Apologetics through Biola University. Steve lives in Abbotsford with his wife and two children.

Episode Links

Steve is part of an awesome organization called Apologetics Canada. We’ve been blessed to have been there friends for some years now!

Steve also hosts (along with others) a weekly podcast with Apologetics Canada – engaging faith and culture.

Read It

*Below is an edited transcription of the audio conversation.

I’m in the studio today with Steve Kim. Steve works at Apologetics Canada as the associate, right?

Associate. I know that’s not a very descriptive title, but all that it means is that I’m Andy’s bondservant. That’s how I describe myself.

And Andy is Andy Steiger, for those who don’t know, he’s the director [of Apologetics Canada].

Director, yep. So he’s the head honcho.

What’s a quick self-bio for those who don’t know you?

Well, here’s my brief life story. I was born and raised in South Korea. And at the age of about fourteen my family moved to Canada and I’ve been here since. I went to Columbia Bible College here in town, in Abbotsford, and did my diploma in worship arts. I then moved on to do my Bachelor of Arts in Biblical Studies with a teaching emphasis.

And then for a while there I wanted to be a Bible translator with Wycliffe, so I went on to Acts Seminaries at Trinity Western University in Langley and I was enrolled in their Master’s of Linguistics and Exegesis program. It’s a two-year program that turns you into a Bible translator. So I did my one year there, then I met a gal, got married, and the whole plan went out the window.

We took our first year off of church commitments, I mean, we attended our Sunday services but ministry commitments and school and things like that, so we took a year off. And it was during that year that I really started rethinking what it was I was really passionate about.

After much deliberation I came to the conclusion that, “Yeah, I really want to get involved in apologetics.”

Because in my early twenties I had actually walked away from my faith.

I was hanging out a lot with my high school friends, most of whom were not Christians. They all had some sort of a church background, but by the time I knew them they had all walked away – almost all of them. And some of them were quite hostile towards it. They weren’t hostile towards me necessarily, but about the church they were very hostile.

But these were my friends, these were the guys and gals that I always hung out with.

See, here’s something that a lot of listeners might be able to resonate with. It’s when we’re hanging out with our non-Christian friends and they make a comment about Christianity. Often it will happen within earshot, but not necessarily addressed to you. And that’s what happened with me a lot of the times. They would make a comment about, “Oh, the Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation,” kind of a thing. It was never addressed to me, but that comment was made within my earshot without even eye contact or anything like that. So, it made it really difficult to engage with them. What ended up happening was I just had to hear it over and over again.

Lies told to you enough times will start sounding really convincing to you

And were you coming back at those comments, or did you stay silent?

For one, I didn’t even know how to come back at it. And so, I was unequipped and that was part of the problem. And when I did try to engage them, it was a little awkward. It just made me sound like the really defensive guy, right? The guy that has to chase after every comment made to correct it to defend his faith. Which I thought was a bit of an unfair setup because it was my friends who were making these comments.

The long and the short of it is, I eventually started to get convinced that their stories and comments were true.

I eventually walked away from my faith and remained an atheist for a number of months before I actually came back to the faith. So in that whole episode I started getting acquainted a little bit with apologetics. I mean I started talking to people. A number of years later somebody I knew from church recommended Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. That was my first real start at apologetics – actually looking into it and studying it.

So, by the time I went to Columbia Bible College I was really interested in apologetics already. And by the time I got married and we were taking the first year off, I thought to myself,

“I would really like to help other people deal with these questions. Because if I went through it, somebody else is for sure.”

Right around this time I started hearing about Apologetics Canada for the first time. I attended the second conference in Surrey, and that’s where I met Andy. I didn’t really get to talk to him much, but he was hosting the Thinking Series afterwards and that’s where I really got to talk to him. And eventually he said, “Why don’t you come work with me?” on the condition that I will go on to do my Master’s in Christian Apologetics, which is what I did. I did my time at Biola University. They have a very solid apologetics program and I did that while I worked here in Abbotsford.

The rest is history as they say. I just finished my degree last December and now I’m sort of in the “rest” mode where I’m not really reading much of anything. I’m taking four months off of reading or anything like that. But it all starts again in May.

Your story is neat because you went to the other side. So you got the understanding of an atheist, right? Now, I was going to ask, did you make that public to your Christian friends and family?

Yes, and no. I let some of my friends know, but it wasn’t like I was going out and advertising. I’m not terribly close to my family, and they didn’t really care whether I was atheist or not. They probably would’ve thought that it was a little bit odd, but they didn’t really care in the end. So it wasn’t like I was being ostracized socially or anything like that.

So we’re in a two-week series called “What Do I Say?” It’s a series that just introduces the question and topic of how to engage non-believers. It’s very broad, it’s huge, I know that. That’s why we’re just going to introduce it. Specifically, what do we say? What do we talk about? Say you have an agnostic friend or a skeptic or maybe someone who just says they’re an atheist – those kinds of people. How do we engage them?

I thought it would be best to start off by determining what exactly a worldview is. So, what is a worldview?

A worldview is a system of beliefs that you have about the world. It is a way that you view the world. A simpler way of putting it is, a take on ultimate reality.

What do you think this world is actually like? Your answer to that question is your worldview.

And so, things like atheism for example, they say there is no god. That’s a way in which atheists make sense of this world. That’s what they believe about this world. That’s their take on reality. Just as Christians will say, “Well, Jesus is the Son of God and He did die and rise from the dead, and through Him we can be restored to the Godhead, the Trinity.” Buddhists, likewise, they have this idea that this world is really an illusion, that behind the veil there is nothing – depending on which stream of Buddhism you go into.

So these sets of beliefs, what you believe about ultimate reality, so if that’s your worldview, then how you live your life, I mean, these beliefs are going to affect what you do. I mean, it should at least.

That’s correct, because sometimes people believe one thing and then they live as though that’s not true. The way you look at the world is basically the way you look at, well, not just the world in the sense of our universe, but this world in the broader sense will include god. Anything outside of our universe, if there is anything.

So our views about God, our views about the world, our views about ourselves – all of these things will have an impact on your actions.

For example, I know this is not a very popular view among my atheist friends, but Dr. Richard Weikart from California State University Stanislaus, he wrote a book called From Darwin to Hitler. What he was arguing was that the Darwinian view of the world had a direct impact on what Hitler did. So his views on race, and the superiority of the Arian race, the Übermensch, sort of the superhuman he was trying to create by manipulating our gene pools, that sort of a thing. A lot of his views seem to have this connection to Darwinism.

Now, that is not to say though that if you’re a Darwinist (if you believe in Darwinism) that you’re automatically like Hitler. Obviously not. We’re not saying that. But while Darwinism may not be what philosophers call a sufficient condition for, say, something like the Holocaust, I would argue that it’s a necessary condition.

All that is to say, what you believe about the world absolutely will have an impact.

As Christians we believe that – well, I guess Jews and Christians – we believe that people are made in the image of God. Which means that each person is infinitely more valuable than the whole universe combined, the material universe. So that obviously is going to have an impact on how you treat people or at least it should have an impact on how you treat people, how you view certain even political issues like abortion or euthanasia – things that have to do with the living and the dying of the person. Yes, it will impact these things.

So if we look at the Christian worldview – and you said that worldviews usually have to do with the supernatural, the world, and people – so when we look at the Christian worldview, you already explained that the Christian worldview would see people as made in the image of God, what about the Christian worldview of the world and God?

Right, we would say, contrary to for example some of the Eastern philosophies, we would argue that the world is not eternal. That the world is a contingent reality – meaning that it depends on the creative act of something else, namely God. And that God and the world are completely separate – we’re not the same in essence, which is what some Buddhists and Hindus for example would believe. They have pantheistic worldviews, meaning that “all is god.”

Whereas Christians would believe that no, God is God, and then He created the world. The world is not God, it’s very much a separate thing.

And He created human beings but He created them in a very special way, for example if you look at the Genesis creation account, you see that whereas everything else He simply creates by fiat, like, by His act of speaking for example, “Let there be…” where all these animals and birds, fish, that sort of thing, but with human beings He takes special care. He actually molds the earth, He pulls some dirt together and He breathes into it. He’s sort of imparting His Spirit so to speak. I’m not sure if that’s a very heretical thing to say, but He gives us a little bit of Himself which we would call the image of God.

So those things would be some of what Christians believe. Of course, a central component in the Christian worldview would be our view of sin and salvation and how we “attain” salvation. Of course we don’t believe that we work towards it, but Christ has done all of the work for us. And so the person of Christ is very much central to the Christian worldview.

As you’re talking I’m just thinking about how I would say that I personally hold to a Christian worldview. So, I open the Bible, I read it, and I understand how I’m supposed to view and worship God, the Triune God. I know what the gospel is and how the world is broken and needs to be saved and redeemed by Jesus.

And then I see people, and since I’m broken, sometimes my actions are contrary to my beliefs. But then I think of my friend who, I would say he’s an agnostic, he doesn’t really care to think about any of this stuff, so he wouldn’t even say “This is the worldview I hold to,” but we can kind of look at his actions and bring them backwards and find out what his worldview is.

Yeah, I find that a lot of agnostics – I have a number of agnostic friends, and I find that a lot of them are defacto atheists in the way they look at the world. They share a lot of the same common ground.

But one thing where they kind of differ on is whereas atheists will say “I don’t believe that God exists,” agnostics will say, “It’s possible that God exists, I don’t know.” That’s what agnosticism means, it just means that you don’t know. You could be agnostic about many other things, but in this case with respect to the existence of God, they’ll say “I don’t know.” Whereas atheists will say, “No, God doesn’t exist,” they make more of a positive affirmation.

Although, that trend is getting reversed a little bit. But, yeah, a lot of agnostics will live as though they’re atheists in effect.

Right, even though they might not say that they’re atheists, they’re living that way.

Now, why is it important for Christians to consider their worldview? A lot of Christians don’t think about their set of beliefs and how that determines how they’ll live. So, why is it important to learn their worldview and also consider the worldviews of others as well?

Well, for one, eternity is at stake, right? If you really think that yes, God exists and that human beings are, at least post-fall, by nature sinful, and that we actually deserve eternal damnation, but the good news is that Christ has done all of the work and by placing our trust in Him and what He has done for us, we can actually be with God. Again, the way we were meant to be right from the start, God’s original intention for us, just to be with Him, we can actually have that back and that’s going to be for all eternity.

Obviously it’s very important whether you are immortal, or whether this world is all there is – that once you die, you’re just eaten by worms and that’s it. Which is what atheism would logically lead you to, more specifically atheistic naturalism will get you there.

So, obviously your worldview has huge implications and again, like we said earlier, that’s going to determine in large part how you’re going to live your life, if you actually take your belief seriously.

If you actually believe, for example, as these militant Muslims would do, if you actually believe that Allah is commanding you to kill the infidels, then yeah, that will lead them to the bombing of Brussels and things like that. I’m not saying that all Muslims are like that, I know lots of Muslims who are peaceful people, but again, all that is showing is that if you actually believe things deeply and if you take your beliefs seriously, it can lead to a large variety of practical consequences which can have life or death implications for a lot of people.

The second reason I guess is because, especially in a country like Canada and the United States, or any western world really, you’re coming across a lot of different people. I mean you just walk downtown Vancouver; you know? In just a couple blocks, easily you’ll hear three to four different languages spoken.

And typically with different languages come different cultures, and with different cultures come different worldviews.

Especially in a place like Vancouver, you’ll see all kinds of worldviews – anything from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, to Buddhists, Hindus, Hare Krishnas, or you might come across Mormons, Scientology – there is actually the Church of Scientology building right downtown.

And so, we’re living in very much a pluralistic world and it’s just not enough to know your own worldview, now you have to start to sort of understand where everybody else is coming from.

And that’s going to help you to have an intelligent conversation about the things that really matter to them and that’s going to open a lot of doors, I think, in terms of evangelism, as well as strengthening your own faith. Because, if you grew up in a Christian environment like I have, chances are when you go onto high school or college or university, especially in college and university, you’ll come across all kinds of worldviews and you might find that your views are even getting attacked by people.

We’re living in a pluralistic world; I don’t think it’s an option anymore to at least have some rudimentary understanding of what other people believe.

Well thank you so much Steve, and I look forward to talking with you next week as well.

Yeah, absolutely, thank you for having me.

The post Episode 072: Why Worldviews? appeared first on Back to the Bible Canada.