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James SireThe Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Christian Theism as the Most Coherent and Viable Worldview
By presenting Christian Theism alongside several other worldviews, Sire aims to demonstrate that Christian Theism is the most satisfactory worldview. According to Sire, Christian Theism meets the three requirements for an adequate worldview: It is intellectually coherent; it comprehends all the data of reality; and it satisfies on a subjective level.
For Sire, Christian Theism is intellectually coherent because it provides a plausible explanation for why moral values exist, why human life is significant, what happens after death, the meaning of history, how we are able to achieve knowledge, and what our goals in life should be. Essentially, all these factors are explained by the existence of a transcendent God who is the origin of all life and value. Other worldviews, in Sire’s view, either avoid answering some of these questions (thus leaving out some of the data of reality) or give unconvincing or inconsistent answers to them (thus failing the test of logic).
Sire makes his case in the face of the historical fact that Western thought in general moved steadily away from Christian Theism. He argues that this move was due in part to a lack of understanding of Christian Theism. In Chapter 11, Sire observes—counter to the general drift of Western thought—that many intellectuals have been led to abandon naturalism and embrace Christianity precisely because of its explanatory power. In doing so, they adopt not only a new religion but a new worldview, a new set of commitments about the nature of reality.
Last but not least, Sire argues that Christian Theism also offers an explanation for the entire trajectory of Western thought toward nihilism, rooting this trajectory in humanity’s sinful tendency due to the Fall—an event that flawed, without entirely destroying, human reason.
The Need to Live the Examined Life
“The unexamined life is not worth living” is a phrase attributed to the Greek philosopher Socrates at his death trial. This phrase has become emblematic of the search for wisdom and knowledge embodied in philosophy. Sire uses it to denote the need to look deeply at our beliefs, values, and entire worldview. Sire states that one of the main purposes of The Universe Next Door is to encourage this process.
According to Sire, there is a set of basic questions about life and the world around us, embodied in the Eight Basic Questions. We must either answer them or ignore them; there is no other option. Even if we fail to answer them in a conscious, intellectual way, our behavior still implies an underlying belief or worldview.
According to Sire, worldview is in a sense “more basic, more foundational” than the study of philosophy or religion (4). This is in part because worldview is often an unconscious set of assumptions or beliefs. As Sire states, “few people have anything approaching an articulate philosophy” or “a carefully constructed theology” (5), yet everyone has a worldview of some kind. Sire goes so far as to argue that “it is only the assumption of a worldview […] that allows us to think at all” (6). By articulating that everyone has a worldview, Sire lays the foundation for the claim that everyone has a reason to live an examined life.
Living the examined life means bringing one’s unconscious beliefs and assumptions to the surface, evaluating them and comparing them to the beliefs of others so as to gain insight into truth and the world around us. The result of this process is “self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-understanding” that is part of the good life (6). Hence, although Sire believes that Christianity is the most coherent, viable, and satisfying worldview, and a key objective of the book is to defend this claim, he also believes that Christians must thoroughly understand other worldviews, as a means to understand one’s own Christian worldview.
The Decline of Western Intellectual History
The sequence of chapters in The Universe Next Door is dictated by an overarching narrative. Sire’s analysis of the arc of Western intellectual history implies a gradual decline, starting from Christian Theism and ending in postmodernism. At root, this decline was due to a weakening of faith in Christian Theism and a turn toward naturalism and related worldviews. A “breakdown in the theistic worldview” led by degrees into a kind of intellectual dead end (3).
However, this history did not proceed in a straight line. Sire characterizes the shift as a schism in which one group of thinkers rebelled against Christian theism or modified its tenets, while others in society remained faithful to older beliefs (and remain so today). The newer intellectual theories did not succeed all at once but filtered down into society gradually over time. Further, the various stages in the ever-widening gap with Christian theism occurred in waves or layers. For example, deism gave birth to naturalism, but aspects of it survive in contemporary culture, combined with other worldviews; some naturalists never became nihilists, and so on.
The whole process of decline can be traced to inner tensions within Christian theism itself, conditioned by frustrating theological debates, religious wars, and the loss of Christian unity after the Protestant Reformation. Further, Sire contends that many Christians understood their own tradition inadequately or failed to apply it to various philosophical questions. For many thinkers, science seemed so powerfully explanatory that God seemed unnecessary as a hypothesis to explain reality. Christian theistic tenets fell away little by little, but the resulting philosophies remained unstable and ever-shifting.
This history is a decline because it consisted of a progressive loss or denial of beliefs that Sire regards as core truths. These include chiefly the belief in an intelligent, good creator God who is the source of moral value. The history is also a decline because the loss of theism involved a loss of a firm sense of the meaning of life, which led to the despair of nihilism; this further necessitated attempts to dig out of the hole by means of existentialism, Eastern philosophy, and New Age thinking. Each worldview has brought new perspectives, but none has recaptured the belief in a personal, transcendent God that, for Sire, alone can function as the ground for truth.
Sire believes that the only salvation for the Western intellectual tradition is to return to the source of the split in early modernity and take the opposite route: that of a “robust” and well-articulated Christian theism.
