The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog

Theism denotes a belief in God as the creator of the universe; specifically, theists believe that God can reveal himself to humankind by means of divine intervention in the world (e.g., in Christianity, by God becoming man in the form of Jesus Christ). This belief in God’s revelation distinguishes theism from deism on the one hand and atheism on the other. Sire’s book is essentially an argument on behalf of Christian theism by contrasting it with rival worldviews that have grown up in the modern West.

Naturalism denotes the belief that all of reality is explainable by laws of science; naturalism rejects the existence of God or the idea that there is purpose in the universe. Sire sees naturalism as the natural result of rejecting belief in a personal God and the next stage after deism in the development (in his view, decline) of Western thought.

Nihilism is derived from the Latin word nihil (meaning “nothing”). Sire defines nihilism as “the denial of any philosophy or worldview—a denial of the possibility of knowledge, a denial that anything is valuable” (84). For Sire, nihilism logically follows from the deist and naturalist worldviews. Western intellectual history since the 19th century, he claims, has been largely an attempt to find a way out of nihilism.

Existentialism is a (predominantly 20th-century) worldview that emphasizes individual human beings’ attempts to define their own sense of meaning and value in the midst of an absurd and meaningless universe. In Sire’s analysis, existentialism is one of modern thought’s attempts to escape the despair of nihilism. Existentialist thinkers have approached the existentialist worldview from both an atheistic and a theistic perspective.

Pantheism (from Greek words for “all” and “God”) is the belief that God and the universe (including human beings and the material world) are one and the same. Monism is the related metaphysical idea that all of reality ultimately consists of a single element. According to Sire’s analysis, both these doctrines form the core of Eastern philosophy and religion.

The New Age perspective denotes a complex worldview of the late 20th and early 21st century that mixes elements of Eastern pantheistic monism with other worldviews, emphasizing the self as the prime reality and source of meaning and human fulfillment as the achievement of a higher consciousness. The New Age worldview often incorporates occult practices and/or beliefs in the paranormal. For Sire, the New Age worldview is an attempt to adapt Eastern philosophy to eclectic Western tastes.

Postmodernism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century worldview that rejects metanarratives and applies critical suspicion to claims of absolute truth or value. Sire sees postmodernism as the dominant intellectual (academic) worldview of his time and is in some ways the culmination of naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, and the impact of Eastern and other non-Western worldviews on Western thinking.

From the satirical novella Flatland (1884) by Edwin J. Abbott, Pointland refers to a state of affairs in which each individual is a separate authority and source of value. Sire uses the expression to point up what he sees as the solipsistic tendency of various worldviews such as New Age thinking.