Worldviews, Part 2

In my prior post on this topic, I described how I plan to approach an upcoming World Religions class I'll teach this coming year at a local college.  Part of the approach is to ask students to identify the presuppositions to their existing worldview, and explain how those impact their choices regarding religious practices.  Before I ask them to do that, however, I should attempt it myself.  So here goes.

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Every time I've taken the Myers-Briggs Temperament Inventory (MBTI), I have come out as an INTJ, which stands for Introverted iNtuitive Thinking with Judging.   That means I am by nature an intuitive person - I just "know" what is so, and go on to defend it by reasoned, informed judgment.  I don't sift through the data first to figure out what's what.  I look around me, see what's there, make an intuitive leap to a conclusion about it, and then sift through the data, either confirming my instinct or correcting it. 

As a boy, I loved being out in the woods in the Fall, or the fields in the Spring, just poking around by myself, hoping for a cool breeze, looking at things around me and thinking about them.  Lakeviews and mountains had a special appeal, as did the beauty of artwork and music (they still do).  I'm not so much of a hands-on guy as a visual one, although really one who enjoys evaluating with all the senses.  Sensory inputs (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches) go straight in to my mind and heart without a lot of processing.  I experience what's around me, take it in, and before you know it, POP! there's an insight, a conclusion (about what I've been immediately experiencing or the larger world around me).  Then I go back over the sensory input with my reason and see if the facts line up with my insight, to see if reason matches that intuitive leap I just made.  I apply this basic process not only to nature, but to people's behavior, to statistics, to philosophy, whatever. It feels hard-wired.

In these early thoughtful forays into nature, it was intuitively obvious to me that nature did not simply appear of its own accord in the form I was perceiving it.  What I was seeing and experiencing had been (and was being) created.  I just knew it to be so.  Yes, there were natural processes operating in and on nature continuously.  But something had started them up, and at the very least gave them enough of a push (and very likely has kept on pushing) to keep them operating just so.  It was as if I had gotten on a bike, pushed hard on the pedals to get up to speed, and now was gently pedaling just enough to keep it steadily moving on a flat road.

Later reading about evolution did not contradict my intuition about a creator.  The natural processes Darwin talked about were put in place (and kept moving) by something.  Nature shifted around (adapted?) as these processes worked.  But it kept going, fairly steadily, like a bike on a flat road, with only the occasional bump, like an ice age or an extinct species.  My intuition told me that the philosophy of materialism was simply the wrong explanation for what I was seeing around me.  There was more to life as I knew it than just matter and energy - there was MORE.  But what was that MORE?

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I'll look at that question in part 3.