Which Lenses Are You Looking Through? The Power of Worldviews

Disclaimer! Philosophy heavy episode! 

This one may not be as directly horse-oriented, but it's still fascinating stuff (at least I think so!) because it's so crucial to how and why we think what we do.

People have all sorts of different beliefs. But the most fundamental of those beliefs, the ones about ultimate reality, color everything else we think, acting like the lenses through which we see the world. Those fundamental beliefs, like physicalism, theism, postmodernism, and more are called our worldview. Which worldview lenses are you looking through? Listen and you might find out! 

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For questions, comments, or ideas: ThePhilosophicalCowgirl@gmail.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey there, and welcome to the Philosophical Cowgirl. I'm your host, Sarah Geis, a former philosophy professor and current full time horse person. This show is where the horse world meets the deep questions of life. In each episode, I'll share insights from my own learning process, and sometimes discuss fascinating ideas with some of the brightest minds out there.

I'm a relentless learner. So in this podcast, you get to ride along with me on that lifelong journey. Whether you're a philosopher at heart. A horse person looking for something new to listen to? Or you're just curious about how these two worlds intersect? This is the show for you.

Sarah: Today is gonna be a little philosophy heavy and a little bit It's a little bit lighter on the horse stuff, but I think this is really important because I want to talk [00:01:00] about worldviews, which is the way that we, as individuals, think about the world, think about what our purpose is, think about our relationship to animals, the way that we think about absolutely everything comes from what's called a worldview. So, what is this thing called a worldview? Well, it is a broad set of viewpoints about ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is what is most powerful, supreme. overarching, ultimately true in life, so that would be the final explanation for everything else.

Why we exist, who God is, uh, what human beings are, um, and the purpose of life. So there's, you know, a lot of stuff contained in this. This is the broadest possible framework for, [00:02:00] um, how we think about what life is.

 A worldview can be thought of as lenses that we put on, so glasses that we put on with particular lenses, that affects how we see reality. Peter Berger, who was a really well known sociologist, coined the term plausibility structure, which is a big phrase, but it, I think, is really important to, um, think of worldviews as plausibility structures.

We're going to encounter people on a day to day basis who disagree with us. And instead of thinking, how in the world could that person think this? Or, um, you know, thinking that somebody is crazy or stupid or whatever. We have to think about what their worldview Allows them to think, or encourages them to think, or um, doesn't allow them to think.

So, if their [00:03:00] worldview makes certain things more plausible, and makes other things less plausible, then all of a sudden, we still can disagree with them, but it makes sense why they believe certain things, right? And why we can't possibly believe what they believe because our worldview doesn't allow for the plausibility of that.

So, um, an example of that might be, and this is going to be just a goofy example, but, um, if I don't believe that blue dogs exist, like, not, you know, dilute type blue dogs, but actually baby blue colored dogs. If I don't believe that those exist, then, um, someone who is talking to me about blue dogs might seem initially crazy until I start to think that maybe they're colorblind and they're seeing things differently than I do.

Um, there's still aren't [00:04:00] blue dogs in existence. That doesn't mean I have to say, Oh wow, there actually are blue dogs. It's just that, you know, everything's relative and they think of it that way. No, there still aren't blue dogs. They're just calling certain kinds of dogs blue because that's how they're seeing them.

Right? So their worldview makes it plausible that there are blue dogs because they see blue or they see things as blue that, When your eyes function normally aren't blue, so our worldviews also make certain actions and certain moral decisions more permissible and other things less permissible.

So, um, there's some actions that we may never view as ethically permissible. Because our worldview doesn't allow for that, um, because maybe, so like slavery, for example.

So let's say, that somebody might have a [00:05:00] worldview that says, all people are not equal. That, um, there's no, nobody created us. We're here on accident. We have evolved. to the point we're at now, and it's survival of the fittest.

Well, what that means is then, all of a sudden, maybe slavery might make sense in some situations, because, um, if there's no created order, if there's no sense of all people being created equal, because there's no creator, and the only thing we have to go on is this survival of the fittest, um, Darwinian.

style view, uh, and that's it, and there is nothing else, then all of a sudden, maybe some people are, maybe more powerful people are, um, permitted to take advantage of less powerful people. Right? It's, it sounds terrible to the vast majority of people who have [00:06:00] more going on in their worldview than only survival of the fittest and only evolution.

But if that is in fact your worldview, then things like that may be permissible. So, we have to, um, look at more than just what somebody is saying and what someone believes and look at why they might believe that based on the worldview.

So some more examples of this idea of a worldview as the lenses that you see the world through or your plausibility Berger's terminology is that an atheist cannot view Jesus as God because God doesn't exist. So whoever Jesus was, whatever Jesus was, he wasn't God. He was something else.

Possibly just a really good teacher, a sage, something like that. But, not God. Uh, another one is that absolute truth is not possible when you're a relativist. When you believe that [00:07:00] truth depends on the person. It always depends on the situation. It always depends on your perspective. Um, absolute truth is simply not possible, and it even is offensive to a relativist.

Just to throw in a, an example that's closer to home here. Um, livestock being used as food is not permissible ethically to someone who believes that livestock are actually our equals, that there's no, again, no created order there. So we're not just dealing with somebody's opinions and their views.

We're also dealing with their entire worldview when we're trying to address these things. So how do we navigate the existence of different worldviews? This is something that confuses a lot of people.

Makes people just want to throw up their hands and say, you know, It takes all kinds, or, uh, Everybody has their own opinion, and that's fine. Don't worry about it. Well, here's the thing. All worldviews, even relativism, Even [00:08:00] when you want to say Look, everybody has a right to their own opinion, and so anything goes. If you want to say that everyone has not only a right to their own opinion, but a right to their own truth, and their views, their worldview is right, is true, for them, And because their worldview is true for them, it is true, period, that would be a relativist, that is actually a claim to absolute truth.

You're saying there is absolutely no absolute truth, which is what we call a self defeating view. So you've just defeated it by saying it. Because if you, if you say there is no absolute truth, you have made a statement that is an absolute truth. So that's one of the multiple reasons why I am not a relativist.

I don't believe in it. I don't think it makes sense. I think it is self defeating. so some people do argue that worldviews are only [00:09:00] subjectively meaningful. So that means personally, internally meaningful. Um, meaning there is no external objective truth component to them. They only exist to make you feel a sense of meaningfulness.

But that, again, itself is a worldview. It's making an objective claim. It's saying that there is no such thing, objectively, accidentally, it's accidentally saying that, there is objectively no such thing as a worldview that is true. That is. It is externally true. It is only meaningful to you personally.

Well, again, that's self defeating. That's making an objective truth claim. The other thing we have to realize when we're dealing with the existence of lots of different worldviews is just because we believe something, just because someone else believes something, or has a certain worldview, it doesn't make it true.

We still have to do the hard work of [00:10:00] evaluating. Our own views and evaluating competing views in order to make sense of reality. So, what we have to do there is 

Try on different lenses.

Sarah: I've used that analogy of world views as lenses that we see the world through. So we have to try on different lenses.

We have to see what helps us to see the world most clearly. So, that's something that I think is Difficult, but extremely important. So then, there's a question that I want to address here, because you may be wondering, Is a worldview the same as a religion? Well, not necessarily. All religions are worldviews.

But not all worldviews are religions, because religions are something that you do with your worldview and a posture that you take toward ultimate reality. Religions are a belief about ultimate reality, or a set of beliefs about ultimate reality. [00:11:00] And it leads to worship and a certain ritual that you do.

So your worldview leads to your religion and then your religion further kind of hones your worldview. But again, not all worldviews are actually religions. So Let's look at the broadest and most basic types of worldviews just so that you get kind of an overview of where people are coming from when they say certain things or think certain things.

So the first one that I want to talk about very briefly, this is going to be a very, very brief bird's eye view of all of these. There are eight of them. Um, the first one is materialism, and a closely related version of this is physicalism. If you really want to go down that philosophical rabbit hole, you can look into the differences, but they're pretty subtle.

These two essentially, believe that the world, the [00:12:00] universe, is nothing but matter, or some kind of derivative of matter. It's physical, right? That's where physicalism comes from. There's nothing else out there. There's no God, there's no, supernatural, there's nothing.

So, uh, you can see where that would lead in terms of, ethics, purpose. Theology, there is no theology. Theology is mainly just stuff we've made up about ultimate reality. Um, so it leads to some kind of interesting places and it is where a lot of our culture is based. Pantheism is the next one, it's number two.

This is where the universe is one ultimate reality. So the universe is God, God is the universe, um, everything is one. Essentially, everything is one supernatural essence and it's our job to awaken to this realization in one way or another. [00:13:00] Buddhism and Hinduism are examples of this. They are not the same.

They are very different. But they both are pantheistic. It's just that Buddhism believes that everything is nothing. Essentially, everything is an illusion. And Hinduism believes that everything is God. So Buddhism is really kind of more, almost the atheistic version of this. And Hinduism is the opposite of that.

It's, again, you're God, everything is God, the Earth is God, God is not a he, God is a we. So, I hope that helps you understand pantheism very briefly. Number three is deism. This is the view that God created the universe. He's the force that kicked it off.

But he's not necessarily a personal being or even involved. He has no interest in humanity. There's really not a connection between us, between God and humanity. [00:14:00] Um, or God and his creation. He just, really it's not even appropriate to say he. Um, It, God, kicked off the universe and then either moved on to something else or is just a force that doesn't interact with us anyway.

So theism, theism, not deism, is the next one. Theism is where God is a he or some kind of personal being. Um, he is the infinite and absolute creator and The source of everything and everyone, he is also active and present in all of life in all of knowledge, he communicates to us, he gives us knowledge and he acts in this world, he acts in our lives.

So Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the big three theistic religions there. Number five, existentialism. This is essentially the, the view that says [00:15:00] life may be hard, confusing, uh, we may not be able to find meaning in life outside of ourselves, but we know ourselves, we know our own experience, and we can create our own meaning through fully embracing our individual journey.

This sounds great. This is, this is kind of like self help 101 here. Um, this is, you know, you are the you're the master of your own ship. Again, it sounds great, but I would just challenge you to look into how plausible it is, because it often leads to what is called an existential crisis, which is where we can't show this to be true in a, in a pinch 

When life gets too hard, too confusing, too painful, any of that stuff, it becomes a problem when you can't figure out where you came from and what your purpose greater than yourself is. Because you need that in order [00:16:00] to anchor yourself in those times. So existentialism has kind of problems with livability and, reasons to believe it, reasons to stick with it. So number six, post modernism. It's similar. It's very similar to existentialism. It believes that there are no meta narratives. There's no grand story. There's no purpose. There's no overarching, story that we all share. There's only individual perspectives.

So there's only what they would call micro narratives. No absolute truth, no objective reality. So existentialism and postmodernism both are very common in our society. And, um, they both can lead to relativism. Which is, again, the belief that anything goes, everybody has their own perspective, everybody has their own truth, and it's not up to any of us to say what's true or false.

Number seven is agnosticism, [00:17:00] which the agnostic is gonna say, I don't know, and they a lot of the time can be called an apathyist, which is somebody that says, I don't care. I just don't care. A lot of times that comes from being overwhelmed with facts, overwhelmed with opinions, or just apathy.

They literally do not care. Not all agnostics don't care, but a lot of them do. Agnosticism, is a lot of the time a jumping off point for maybe research into some other worldviews, the attempt to look into, What is true, um, a placeholder kind of, and then a lot of the time it's just a lifestyle.

But, either way, agnosticism doesn't know. Nihilism is the last one I'm going to cover, which is that everything is meaningless. So this is often seen as a logical conclusion of atheism, of physicalism slash [00:18:00] materialism, which is that first one we talked about, um, and of postmodernism.

And then a lot of the time it's seen as the logical conclusion of existentialism. After the existential crisis. So if someone says, I can make my own meaning, My, my journey is all that matters, Um, all of a sudden, When, when they have to ask themselves, Well, how do I know that my journey is all that matters?

Or, or why does my journey matter? Why should my journey matter? My journey is painful. My journey is, confusing and overwhelming. That's what leads to an existential crisis, which then a lot of the time can cause somebody to say, you know, what everything's meaningless Nothing matters.

I don't even need to really try any more to make sense of any of this and A lot of the time, that's what leads to depression, suicidal thoughts, and sometimes even suicide. That's a scary place to be.

So, again, if nihilism is the [00:19:00] end result of a lot of these worldviews, you have to look at the worldview with some degree of suspicion and say, well, if that's true, then the consequences of that are pretty scary. So I really need to Make, make sure that that is true and nothing else is true. Uh, because if something else that's better, that makes more sense, that gives me meaning and purpose is true, then I don't need to believe nihilism.

I don't need to believe anything that leads to nihilism. So, it's pretty important stuff here. So anyway, that's all I've got. If you have ideas for anything that you want me to dive into further, Please let me know. You can email me at thephilosophicalcowgirl at gmail dot com. And, uh, I also would love it if you could leave reviews, leave ratings.

That helps for the show to get pushed out to a broader audience, a wider audience. And then if that happens, then [00:20:00] it's more likely that I can keep this thing going. So, I sure appreciate you listening, and I'll see ya next time.