Worldviews are culturally created and essential for a society’s survival. Only by agreeing with one another on what we and the world are about can we have human societies and cultures. And only by growing into and accepting the prevailing worldview can we claim membership in a society. We may add our own individual touches. But if we don’t fit into the culturally approved way of seeing the world, we will be dismissed as being either very bad or very mad.
All worldviews, whether religious, scientific, or some combination of the two, give an account of how the world is ordered. In religious worldviews, the order derives from a deity or deities who rule the world in a purposeful way and reveal that order through inspired individuals and/or sacred writings. In scientific worldviews, the order derives from observing it in nature, devising theories to explain it, and testing those theories against predictions we make from them. Because each carries implications for how we should order our own lives, a worldview also includes political, ethical, and other cultural ideas about how we should behave. It orients us. It tells us who and where we are in the larger scheme of things, and provides a kind of map to guide our behaviour. And if it is credible at all, it gives our life a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose.
Our need for meaning cannot be satisfied by science alone. We live our lives in the context of ultimate questions – Why does anything exist, rather than nothing at all? What existed before space-time came into being? What triggered the Big Bang? Whence came the laws that have governed the universe since its inception? Is there a purpose in evolution? Is history going anywhere? – questions that are unanswerable on the grounds of scientific evidence. Science is a limited mode of inquiry that looks at repetitive aspects of the natural world and points to no meaning or purpose whatsoever. So meaning-seeking creatures like us turn as well to a broader metaphysical or spiritual mode of inquiry that seeks a non-empirical realm of meaning and value, recognising that our answers to these BIG questions are beliefs that can neither be proven nor refuted.
A worldview that satisfies our need for meaning can only be presented in a story with both a mythic and scientific aspect. The mythic aspect should never contradict but rather complement the scientific. A worldview should tell “the universe story” in accordance with the best knowledge of the time, combined with mythic accounts of what we cannot understand rationally.
It is through the mythic component, often enshrined in religion and expressed in rites and rituals, that a worldview is imprinted on the psyche of children during their “impressionable years.” Mythic stories convey the norms of the society; religious beliefs lend supernatural muscle to enforce behaviour in accordance with those norms; religious or other symbols (e.g. a crucifix, an image of the Buddha, a national anthem or flag) evoke a deep emotional resonance that elicits allegiance; and the repetitive observance of rites and rituals effectively imprints the perceptual categories that comprise the worldview. By absorbing the cultural myths and participating in its rites, children internalise the worldview that qualifies them to become full-fledged members of their society.
Joseph Campbell has documented the extent to which the same mythic themes are found throughout the world, in widely separated societies with no known means of communication between them. Legends of the serpent, a tree, a garden of immortality, paradise lost and regained, virgins giving birth to heroes who die and are resurrected – they are the same all over the world, however variously they are presented in different traditions. Carl Jung called these archetypes of our collective unconscious – structures of the human psyche that somehow serve to keep our individual conscious minds aligned with the depths of what we share with all humanity. I don’t pretend to understand this or the extent to which these universal mythic themes provide a kind of necessary architecture for our ever-evolving worldviews. If they do contribute to such an architecture, we would do well to recognise this in shaping our emerging global worldview. Certainly I welcome thoughts that readers may have that might enlighten me on this subject.
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