The Christian Worldview Examined

Putting My Own Map on the Table

Lesson 4.2 asked you to fill out the Four Corners grid for yourself and for the group you understand least, and to let an actual member of that group correct your version of them. If you did it, you have already done something most leaders never do. Now I owe you the same courtesy in reverse. This lesson is my position, and I am going to state it the way I would want a critic to state it, then test it in front of you.

The Christian worldview is not primarily a list of doctrines. It is a story in four acts, and every corner of the grid gets its answer from where you are in the story.

Act one is creation. 'God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them' (Gen. 1:27, NASB), and of the whole work the text says, 'God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good' (Gen. 1:31, NASB). Two claims are doing all the work. Reality is made rather than brute, so it is intelligible and it is not neutral. And human worth is conferred by the Maker, which means it is universal, unearned, and not revocable by anyone's opinion, including the state's. Note carefully what this rules out. It rules out a worth that scales with productivity, intelligence, health, usefulness, or belief. Every person, including the person who thinks all of this is nonsense, is an image bearer.

Act two is the fall. Genesis 3 puts the break not at ignorance or scarcity but at a refusal — the serpent's question, 'Indeed, has God said?' (Gen. 3:1, NASB), and the choice that follows. The claim is that the corruption is universal and interior, that it runs through every person rather than between the good people and the bad ones, and that it distorts the very faculties we would use to assess it. That last part is the uncomfortable half. If it is true, then my reasoning about my own motives is compromised evidence.

Act three is redemption. God does not scrap the project or start over. He enters it. Paul writes that Christ 'is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation,' that 'all things have been created through Him and for Him,' that 'in Him all things hold together,' and that God was pleased 'through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross' (Col. 1:15-20, NASB). The distinctive move is not that God provides a rescue plan from a distance. It is incarnation and crucifixion — the maker inside the wreck, absorbing the cost.

Act four is restoration. The story does not end with souls evacuating a doomed world. It ends with repair. 'And He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain' — and from the throne, 'Behold, I am making all things new' (Rev. 21:4-5, NASB). All things new, not all new things. That distinction is the difference between a worldview that abandons the city and one that works on it.

The Four Acts as an Operating System

Before we test any of it, notice what those four acts do to a leader if he actually believes them, because a worldview that does not change behavior is decoration.

Creation gives you a floor under every constituent. If worth is conferred and universal, then the difficult resident at the community board meeting has standing you did not grant and cannot revoke. He is not a nuisance with a microphone. This is what keeps a leader from the most natural drift in public life, which is the quiet sorting of people into those who matter to your coalition and those who do not. It also cuts against you personally: your own worth is not on the ballot, which is the only condition under which a person can afford to lose an election honestly.

The fall gives you an institutional design principle, and this one is worth its weight in charter reform. If corruption is universal and includes the reformer, then you do not build systems that depend on good people. You build systems that assume everyone in them is corruptible and then make corruption visible and expensive. Madison put it in Federalist 51 in a sentence every executive should have memorized: if men were angels, no government would be necessary. Separation of powers, independent audit, term limits, the inspector general — these are not cynicism. They are institutional humility, and the humility has to include you or you have not understood the doctrine.

Redemption keeps you from the opposite error. A leader who holds only the fall becomes a manager of decline who assumes nothing improves and no one changes. If redemption is real, then people can genuinely change, situations are not finally fixed, and restoration is a live category rather than sentimentality. It is why a jail can be evaluated on whether anyone comes out different and not only on whether anyone escapes.

Restoration sets your relationship to time. If the story ends in repair, then work on real, physical, unglamorous things — sewers, schools, streets — is not wasted effort in a doomed system. And you do not have to save the world by Friday. The urgency is real; the panic is not required. I have watched leaders burn themselves and their staffs to ash because functionally they believed everything depended on them. That is a worldview problem showing up as a calendar problem.

And I will say plainly where this comes from and what it outranks. Scripture is the foundation here — above denomination, above the church fathers, above church culture, above tradition and church history. Those things have value and I read them. They do not sit above the text. If that sounds narrow to you, notice that it is at least falsifiable in principle: it means you can hold me to a document I did not write and cannot revise. A leader whose authority rests on a text he is accountable to is in a very different position from a leader whose authority rests on his own accumulated judgment.

The Arguments, and What They Actually Establish

Now the philosophical case. My position is classical apologetics with evidential support, and the honest version of it is much more modest at each step than the popular version, which is exactly why it is more useful.

Start with contingency, in the Leibnizian form William Lane Craig has revived. Everything we observe in the universe exists but need not have existed. A full explanation of a contingent thing eventually requires something whose existence is not contingent — otherwise the explanation never terminates. The strongest objection is not stupid: the principle of sufficient reason may not hold universally, and the universe may simply be a brute fact requiring no explanation. That reply is coherent. What it costs is the intuition that drives all inquiry, including science, which is that things have explanations. So the argument is a genuine trade rather than a proof, and I will not describe it as more.

The kalam cosmological argument runs differently: whatever begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. Here is where you must be careful, because this is the argument most often overclaimed. Cosmological evidence for expansion is strong. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin result shows that spacetimes satisfying a certain average-expansion condition cannot be extended infinitely into the past — but cosmologists including Vilenkin himself have been careful about what follows, models with alternative past structures exist, and the causal premise is disputed where quantum phenomena are involved. Present kalam as a serious argument with real physics behind it and a live scholarly dispute around it. Present it as a proof and an informed critic will dismantle you in public.

The moral argument is the one I find most forceful and it is also the most misunderstood. It is not the claim that atheists cannot be moral; they plainly can be, often more consistently than I am. The claim is about grounding: if objective moral values and duties exist — if the torture of a child is actually wrong and not merely disapproved of — then there must be something that makes it so, and a universe of indifferent matter is a poor candidate. The steelman against this is strong and you should know it. Erik Wielenberg and others argue for non-natural moral realism: objective moral facts that simply exist, necessarily, without a grounder, in the same way many philosophers treat mathematical truths. Russ Shafer-Landau argues similarly. That is not a dodge, and calling it one is intellectually lazy. And the Euthyphro dilemma still stands at the door — is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good — with the standard answer being Robert Adams' modified divine command theory, which locates the good in God's nature rather than in arbitrary decree. That answer is serious. It is not universally accepted.

So what do these arguments establish, if they work? At most a necessary, uncaused, immaterial, immensely powerful, personal cause of the universe, and a transcendent ground of moral value. That is a long way from the God of Genesis and Colossians, and any apologist who slides from one to the other without noticing has cheated. The bridge is historical, not metaphysical: the claim that a particular man in a particular decade was executed and then raised. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona built the minimal-facts case on data broadly granted across the scholarly spectrum. The serious counters are equally real — Hume's argument that no testimony can establish a miracle because the improbability always exceeds the reliability of witnesses, and the Bayesian base-rate objection that follows from it, plus critical scholars like Bart Ehrman who accept several of the same facts and reject the explanation — though be precise rather than sloppy here, because Ehrman grants the crucifixion and the disciples' experiences while explicitly disputing the empty tomb, and a leader who misstates what his opponent concedes has already lost the argument. J. P. Moreland and John Lennox work this territory carefully, Greg Koukl teaches the conversational discipline for it in Tactics, and Nabeel Qureshi's own account is instructive precisely because following the evidence cost him his family. That is what an argued worldview looks like when it stops being an argument.

The Bill I Cannot Pay

Every worldview has an unpaid bill — a fact it explains worse than its rivals do. Naturalism's is consciousness and the sense that some things really matter. Mine is evil, and I am not going to be slick with you about it.

State it at full strength. The logical version, argued most sharply by J. L. Mackie in 1955, claimed a strict contradiction between a wholly good omnipotent God and the existence of evil. That version has largely been abandoned, and I want to be fair to both sides in saying why: Alvin Plantinga's free will defense showed it is at least possible that a world containing free creatures who sometimes choose wrongly is worth more than a world of determined ones, and possibility is all the logical version required to defeat. Mackie himself later conceded that narrow point, granting in The Miracle of Theism that the free will defense shows theism is not logically inconsistent. Do not celebrate too early. He conceded only the logical version and went on pressing the evidential one, and that was always the weaker form of the argument anyway.

The evidential version is the real one. William Rowe put it with a case that has haunted the literature: a fawn burned in a forest fire started by lightning, dying alone over days, unseen by any human being. No free choice caused it. No soul is built by it. No one is even edified by knowing about it. Multiply that by the animal suffering of hundreds of millions of years, then add the human cases — the child dying of bone cancer, the tsunami, the abused infant. The argument is not that this is logically incompatible with God. It is that it is exactly what you would expect if there were no such God, and not at all what you would expect if there were. That is evidence, and it is heavy.

Dostoevsky put the emotional form better than any philosopher. Ivan Karamazov catalogs the torture of children and then says he is not rejecting God but returning the ticket — refusing admission to any harmony purchased at that price. If your response to that speech is a syllogism, you have not read it. Dostoevsky was a believer and he wrote the objection at full power on purpose.

Now the responses, honestly graded. Skeptical theism, developed by Stephen Wykstra and others, argues that our failure to see a justifying reason is weak evidence that there is none, since a being of that magnitude would plausibly have reasons beyond our access. That is logically sound as far as it goes. The cost is severe and its own advocates admit it: if our moral vision is that limited, other moral inferences get shakier too. John Hick's soul-making theodicy argues that a world with real difficulty is required to grow real persons. It has genuine explanatory power for some suffering and almost none for the fawn. Marilyn McCord Adams argued that theodicy at the aggregate level misses the point entirely, and that what matters is whether God can defeat horrendous evil within the life of each person who suffers it — and she located the answer in the cross rather than in a theory.

That is where I land, and I want to be exact about what I am and am not claiming. I do not have an explanation. The book of Job is the honest template: Job asks the question the whole book has built, God answers out of the whirlwind, and the answer is not an argument. What Christianity offers is not a solution but a location — a God who did not remain outside the suffering but entered it and was killed inside it, and a promised end in which every tear is wiped away. Whether that is adequate is a judgment you have to make, and reasonable people make it both ways. I hold the position. I have not closed the case, and any teacher who tells you the problem of evil has been solved is either uninformed or selling something.

What This Costs and What It Builds

Now the science, and this is where my own side most often embarrasses itself, so I will be blunt.

Fine-tuning first. It is a real observation in physics that several constants and initial conditions fall within narrow ranges that appear necessary for a life-permitting universe, and the cosmological constant is the standard example. Physicists disagree about what it means. There is a genuine technical difficulty about assigning probabilities over unbounded parameter ranges — the measure problem — and the two serious rivals are that a deeper theory fixes the constants, or that a vast ensemble of universes plus observer selection makes our situation unsurprising. Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis, working cosmologists, argue the fine-tuning is a real feature of the physics while being careful about the theological step. Victor Stenger and Sean Carroll have argued against the inference. So: contested inference, not established fact, and anyone who tells you physics has proved God is doing damage to the case he thinks he is making.

Origin of life is worse for overclaimers. There is at present no accepted account of how life began. Miller and Urey's 1953 experiment produced amino acids under an assumed early atmosphere now thought unrepresentative. The RNA world is the leading research program and it has unsolved problems. Sutherland's group demonstrated prebiotic routes to pyrimidine ribonucleotides in 2009, which was real progress on a real obstacle. Here is the part my side needs to hear: the absence of an accepted account is not evidence for design. That is an argument from ignorance, and dressing it up does not change what it is. Stephen Meyer argues the design inference from information; the great majority of working origin-of-life researchers reject it. State that plainly and you keep your credibility. Hide it and you will lose the room the moment a scientist walks in.

History gives the doctrine of the image of God its best evidence and its worst indictment, and integrity requires both. The best: the Germantown Quakers' 1688 protest, the first known formal antislavery protest in the English colonies, argued from the golden rule. Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect worked from the same anthropology across decades. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963 grounded civil disobedience in a natural-law argument running through Aquinas — an unjust law is one out of harmony with the moral law. The worst: the same Scriptures were used to defend the trade. Genesis 9 was twisted into a curse justifying racial slavery. Ephesians 6 was preached at enslaved people as a duty of obedience. An edited Bible printed in 1807 for use with enslaved people in the West Indies removed the Exodus. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 over whether slaveholders could be appointed as missionaries, and issued a formal apology for that history in 1995.

Do not resolve that tension too quickly, and do not let anyone resolve it for you in either direction. Frederick Douglass, who had every reason to discard the whole thing, did not. In the appendix to his 1845 Narrative he drew a line between the Christianity of Christ and what he called the Christianity of this land, and he judged the second by the first. That is an internal critique, and it is the strongest kind, because it means the standard used to condemn the abuse came from inside the same book. A worldview that supplies the tools for its own correction is not thereby proved true. But it is not the same as one that has no such tools, and the difference matters.

So bring it back to the office. This worldview gives a leader a specific theory of power: authority is delegated, never owned, and Jesus stated the executive form of it directly — the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and it shall not be so among you. Greatness runs through service. It gives a theory of self: you are fallen, so build the audit, keep the people who will tell you no, and never trust a structure whose only safeguard is your own character. And it gives a theory of the constituent: every person in your jurisdiction bears the image of God, without exception — the ones who vote for you, the ones who hate you, the ones who will never know your name. Lesson 4.4 turns the same rigor on naturalism, secular humanism, and postmodernism, and states each in the strongest form its advocates would recognize. If I have been honest with my own bill here, you have reason to trust that I will be honest with theirs.