Forum Summary: What’s Your Worldview?
Author: Juliette McNair | Student, LivingEd-Charlotte 2020
Estimated Reading Time: 1 min.
Mr. Peter Nathan, regional director of Europe, Africa, and the UK, spoke on the alternative worldviews—or “universes”—people have today. He posed the question, “Why is it that we come to very different conclusions?”
Two Realities
Mr. Nathan walked us through the history of Thomas Aquinas’ introduction of Aristotelian views into mainstream Christianity in the 13th century. The world, according to these philosophies, is made up of two realities: the spiritual and the natural.
As the centuries passed, humanist personalities like Charles Darwin contributed to an emphasis on the natural world over the spiritual. The subsequent secularization of society has closed off our “universe” from any spiritual reality. The modern world, as we know it, contains little trace of God or religion in its thinking.
Free from the trap
We are living in a sea of worldviews blinded from the reality of the spiritual. Mr. Nathan exhorted us to take on the responsibility of looking to God to provide “a perspective for interpreting every subject” and to grasp the spiritual metanarratives that accompany our physical realities. If we do this, we free ourselves from the blinded, closed-off universe in which our society is trapped.
This post is part of our new series of student-written content for LivingEd-Charlotte. These summaries cover topics originally presented by our faculty and guest speakers in our weekly Forum and Assembly. For more Assembly-related content check out our Second Thoughts posts
