INTRODUCTION

This is, in part, a sketch of a philosophical landscape with which I am mostly comfortable and, in part, a mental/emotive/spiritual autobiography.  It is also—even at my advanced age—still a work in progress, which means, by the way, that the sequence of posts that will comprise the content of my world view may, or may not, always appear in an uninterrupted series.

This venture began with a similar paper I wrote in 1977 for a course called “Synoptics,”—literally, “to see together”—subtitled, World View Seminar, which was the capstone course in a highly interdisciplinary general education curriculum at Mars Hill College “back in the day.”  The course explored a number of world views, and students were required to choose one, explain and summarize it, and indicate where they agreed and disagreed with it, thus allowing their own world view to emerge. Faculty decided students shouldn’t be required to do something we weren’t willing to do, so each of us wrote our own world view paper and most, including mine, were presented in common  sessions. I wrote a somewhat revised and updated version in 2000, reflective of my own journey during the intervening years, and have found notes for the revision but, sadly, no copy of the document itself. 

I have always been a proponent and an adherent of lifelong learning and, while I don’t intend to stop since “it isn’t over until it’s over,” now in my ninth decade I’m closer to the finish line than I used to be.  So now, more than two decades since I last thought through the issues inherent to my world view in any systematic way, it seems a good time to reflect on them anew.

The notion of “world view,” as defined in that Synoptics course and as generally conceived, addresses four topics that will comprise the substance of these reflections that I will offer in a series of posts: 

(1) an epistemological framework—the “way of knowing” that undergirds all of what follows;

(2) my view of the nature of persons, including the ethical dimension of human relationships and human behavior;

(3) the nature of the natural world;

(4) and by whatever name you might wish to use, the nature and/or existence of a Supreme Being, God—or, as my friend, the late John Claypool, often said, “The Great Mystery”—that lies at the core of the universe and of the human longing for Something larger than and beyond our finite selves.

If you have been heroically reading my blogs for a while, you know that I have done some musing about these issues from time to time, particularly in the series of posts during the summer of 2019 on “Knowing and Believing.”  So, should you choose to “soldier on,” some of what you see in these series of posts may sound familiar.  As I have massaged and tinkered with the positions I took twenty and forty years ago, from the viewpoint of a changing world and my own journey, there have been in some parts mere changes around the edges but not much change in substance, and in other parts more significant shifts at the core.

This has been, then, an intensely personal undertaking and is, thus, written in the first person singular.  It is essentially undocumented.  While I acknowledge an enormous debt to more people than I can name or even remember, I have—with a few exceptions, especially in the section on nature, where I am the least comfortable with my technical knowledge—consciously avoided “going back to the sources” for ideas, for support, for phrasing or for a jolt to the memory.  In a case or two, I have allowed someone to say something—in poetic or narrative form—in which I strongly believe and far better than I could say it. But for the most part, I wanted the ideas and interpretations of the world that have molded me, and that I have made my own, to filter through my consciousness in whatever personalized forms they have taken, without comparing them to the “originals” or getting too tense about their acceptability or paranoid about their orthodoxy. 

To say it another way, I have tried to “see things together”—to be “synoptic”—at the most introspective level.  So while I may “drop some names” as they occur to me, I have rarely gone back for chapter and verse.

I may also use some “technical jargon” from time to time but for the most part I’ll try to say what have to say in plain English.

Some of the positions I have taken—or have chosen not to take—will probably not be comfortable ones for some of my friends or family, should they choose to read these reflections.  Of course, that is nothing new, given some of my other blog posts. So, I simply ask that they respect the long and thoughtful journey that has led me to where I am and where, in some respects, I continue to travel.

I.  IN THE BEGINNING . . .

Let me provide at the outset a point of reference for what follows.  As I noted in a previous post, if I had to choose a “label” for my world view, it would be a Reverent—or, perhaps, Spiritual—Humanism.  The tentativeness aside, if I understand myself, that is what I am, and what follows will be an unpacking of that “label-in-progress” as I choose to wear it.

I always wondered as a lad what I would be “when I grew up.”  Now, in my mid-eighties, I reflect back on that process of growing up without being fully conscious of it, and of becoming some things without ever fully deciding to do so.  I am in large part a child of my family heritage, my culture, and my education. There is a profound sense in which I never will “grow up” if that means utterly leaving those things behind, all of which I would no doubt understand better and more clearly if, like a couple of my treasured friends—namely, Joel Stegall and Jim Thomas—I had taken the time and effort to think through and write my Memoirs. So far I have, sadly, not done so, but maybe, . . . .  maybe one day I’ll have the energy of purpose to catalog my own life story, although I’m sure that my recall of names, places, and experiences will not come close to matching their impressive memories. Meanwhile, if you wish, you can find a brief biographical sketch in the About Me section of the blog site

I own some basic assumptions that are in large measure the foundation of my values and my methodology.  They are mostly causes rather than effects of any world view I can articulate—i.e. they determine the boundaries and some of the content of my world view. Thus, what follows in the subsequent posts “makes sense” to me.  While a more objective critique may turn up some logical inconsistencies, there is a certain incorrigible logic about my world view, or anyone else’s: it is formed out of inferences from my most basic assumptions!

In the second post, which will appear at some point, I’ll address some methodological approaches and an epistemological framework. I hope you’ll have the patience and persistence to stay with me.