World View

1. In this talk, I would like to focus on the two attitudes that I have towards your project. It is not that I have ambiguous feelings; no, I have two distinct feelings. On the one hand, I am convinced that you will not reach your goal because such a goal is unreachable. Not only that. Your goal is undesirable and best abandoned. On the other hand, if you strive with integrity, clarity and passion …

It would be interesting to answer the question of whether or not The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is a religious story by testing against ‘religion is an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos’. Does the Lord of the Rings give an account in which the causal and intentional explanations for the happenings in Middle Earth fall together? One of the problems in testing a scientific theory and …

Lets become clear about the nature of my claims about worldviews. The word carries multiple meanings. It has partly to do with the multiple meanings of the component words: world’ and ‘view’. In daily language-use, ‘world’ is used to pick out (a) a spatial and temporal slice of the cosmos (b) and/or the entire Cosmos itself. The first, the slices, are many: from the ‘social world’ to the …

To begin with the question raised in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’: Do all cultures, peoples, and individuals need a world view to navigate themselves in the world? The answer is in the negative because religion is not a cultural universal and the only examples we have of world views are religions. Are the atheists, free thinkers, and people ignorant of …