Why is Worldview Important?

When I was a kid, I remember someone telling me that dogs were color-blind. At first, I probably assumed that they just saw everything like an episode of I Love Lucy, in black and white. But because I’m a nerd, I had to start studying it and I came to understand that there were physical differences in the amount and kind of cones in a dog’s eye that allowed them to see blues and yellows but not reds because of the different wavelengths of light. I learned that dogs see the world differently than I do. You can imagine my shock when I found out in my studies that some people, around 10% of men and 1% of women, experience the world in a vastly different way than I do.

You may have seen some of the viral videos that were very popular a few years ago that feature color-blind people trying on a pair of EnChroma glasses for the first time. If not, do yourself a favor and fall down that rabbit hole for a while. Many of the reactions are extremely emotional because these glasses are allowing that person to experience a wider range of colors than they have previously experienced. This is probably the reason that I really enjoyed stories like The Wizard of Oz, The Giver, and Pleasantville.

So what is the difference? I may be able to sit down with a color-blind person and they could properly identify all the colored objects in the room. The apple is red, the banana is yellow, and the orange is… well orange. But how do I know that what they are perceiving orange the same way I am? How could they communicate these differences to help me understand how they experience the world? Philosophers call these different experiences of reality qualia. They can cover a wide range of subjective experiences. You know, the sound of a B minor chord, the taste of a Sausage McGriddle, a fear of spiders, or the color of that stupid dress (it was white and gold by the way).

But the question still remains, “What is real?” We all want to be right when presented with a dress on a meme, but what real significance does that have? It might tell us that our eyes sometimes easily fool us, but it leaves me asking deeper questions about truth. If everyone sees the world differently, then who is right? Is there such a thing as right? For Christians, our answer comes back to creation itself and God’s choice to reveal things to his creation. If we are to ever find objective truth, it must come from outside of us. There is nothing to say that color-blind people aren’t actually perceiving reality correctly while the rest of us are mistaken except the fact that we are the majority.

The same thing is true for the big questions of life that all different worldviews seek to answer. When we ask a question like “What is the meaning of life?” All we can come up with on our own is subjective opinions without ever really knowing who is right. Until we seek the answer from outside of not just ourselves but outside of human experience altogether. We must pursue the answers to these questions from one who stands outside of them. In the Christian Worldview, that is God. Part of the reason why really divisive things like religion and politics divide is that we naturally approach them from a subjective standpoint and we speak in terms of our own qualia. This never gets us deeper to ask questions about what is actually real.

This is why worldview is so important. Because, if the sunset really is beautiful because it reflects God’s beauty and people are going around thinking that it’s all muddled, then it is loving to help them perceive what is actually is in front of their eyes more clearly. In those videos, why didn’t the color-blind people get offended when their friends and family tried to show them what they were seeing all along? Doesn’t that seem arrogant that they would try to force their point of view on someone else? It seems silly when you think of it, but if they were sharing their faith it might look different. Instead, when they put the glasses on, they melt under the beauty that they have been missing all this time.

This is why Christians are burdened with sharing the good news of the grace of God. It’s as if our eyes have been opened to the beauty of God in Christ and now when we learn that others are blind to it, we are compelled to show them the qualia that they are missing out on. And for the Christian, it goes deeper than a simple emotional response. It is a relationship with God and a hope of a glorious new life that we have experienced in Jesus Christ. If that sounds foreign to you, maybe you are Jesus blind. I would love to talk to you more about what it means to walk by faith and not by sight. Because I feel like the blind man that Jesus healed. When the officials questioned him his only response in John 9:25 was, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”