The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalogue
Book Review • James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalogue, 5th edition (Downers Grove, IN: IVP Academic, 2009). Kindle Edition. 293 pp. $9.
Read time: 12 min
In his well-known work The Universe Next Door, the late Christian apologist James Sire offered an insightful and accessible introduction to ten distinct worldviews at play in our world today. Sire dedicated a chapter for each of the following worldviews: Theism, Deism, Naturalism, Marxism, Nihilism, Existentialism, Eastern Monism, New Age Philosophy, Postmodernism, and Islam.
My chapter-by-chapter reflections below are more summary digests than a critical review. On the whole, Sire’s classic does what it sets out to do—introduce the reader to ten of the most common and influential Weltanschauungen that Christians are likely to encounter in the ideological universe living, perhaps even, next door.
Chapter 1: A World of Difference
Sire’s chapter entitled “A world of difference” faces the unavoidable reality that one’s worldview drastically affects one’s outlook. Often a dismal outlook (be it in film, poetry, or philosophy) can be traced back to the contours of how a person answers the fundamental questions of life. Sire lists eight foundational questions that determine a worldview. And regardless of how we might answer them, our actions may tell a clearer story of how we really see the world than do our words: “It is important to note that our own worldview may not be what we think it is. It is rather what we show it to be by our words and actions.”
Here are the questions:
What is prime reality—the really real?
What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
What is a human being?
What happens to a person at death?
Why is it possible to know anything at all?
How do we know what is right and wrong?
What is the meaning of human history?
What personal, life-orienting core commitments are consistent with this worldview?
Chapter 2: A Universe Charged with the Grandeur of God—Christian Theism
In Christian Theism, God himself is the Prime reality. Infinite, personal, revealed in the Holy Scriptures; Triune, transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign, and good. The world we know is his creation, and thus it functions orderly and predictably, which is the foundation of scientific law. Our place in the cosmos as humans is special, in that we bear the image of God, reflecting him (finitely) in personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, and gregariousness. So far so good.
Though created morally upright, because of the Fall, we humans do not function to the full extent that we were created. We are both noble and languishing in ruin, naturally speaking. Evil human moral choices (sin) ultimately result in death, and separation from God upon death, an eternal separation from our Creator. We know all this because God has communicated this to us in various ways throughout history, most notably via scripture and his Son. Based on what God has revealed, we can know right from wrong, which is ultimately rooted in God's own moral character. All of history is moving towards a final end determined by God the Creator. Thus, the life of a Christian Theist is therefore to be loved by God, to please God, to enjoy his companionship, and to participate in his redemptive efforts in the world through Jesus Christ.
Chapter 3: The Clockwork Universe: Deism
The worldview of Deism is unstable and largely unsustainable, since it replaces objective special revelation with autonomous, subjective human reason. Due to its central dependence upon reason, conceptions of God as the First Cause, the Energy, the Cosmic Clockmaker are as varied as Deists themselves.
It seems that Deism has functioned as a halfway house for those who eschew the authority of scripture and the Christian view of God. It’s ethics are determined by what a deist deduces as ‘right’ from nature itself, which is thought to be in its originally created state. The orthodox idea of a ‘Fall’ is passé and nature—even as harsh as it can be—is as things were intended to be by God, who created, set in motion, and essentially abandoned his universe. Humans are determined largely, in that the system of nature, determined down to every cog in the machine, is set and unchangeable. I guess this means that prayer is unheard, unanswered, and ineffectual.
A popular version of deism has been call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” This strand entertains a vague sense of God, but as distant, ethically-indulgent and excusing, and largely irrelevant except for when humans need something from him. The foundational apostasy seems to be substituting divine revelation for autonomous, subjective, human reason.
Chapter 4: The Silence of Finite Space: Naturalism
A movement towards Naturalism, historically, followed on the heels of Deism, accepting the thesis that the universe is a well-oiled machine that functions as it always has since its inception. The difference: it wasn’t a God that put things into motion. Matter, rather, is eternal. Somehow things were launched at some time in the past, and we humans have evolved into intelligent organisms sometime in the recent past, being only matter in motion ourselves. Meaning and morality are social constructions.
God’s existence, in a Naturalistic way of thinking, is no longer helpful for explaining the mysterious reasons behind origins, ethics, and the course of history. Nature is a closed system that works things out on its own. The death of humans effectively ends their existence. They return to dust, and “live on”, so to speak, only in the sense that their memory and effects outlast their final breath.
The epistemology of all this is shaky business for anyone affirming such a reality. As Sire notes, “Could a being whose origins were so ‘iffy’ trust his or her own capacity to know? Put personally: If my mind is conterminous with my brain, if ‘I’ am only a thinking machine, how can I trust my thought?”
Chapter 5: Zero Point: Nihilism
Such a depressing worldview! But it’s remarkable just how honest some naturalistic, atheistic philosophers have been with the nihilistic results of honest naturalism. Of course some many atheists stop short of affirming Nihilism, but they do so, as argued here by Sire, without much warrant.
In Nihilism, nothing really matters—no pun intended. There is no goal of history, no cosmic oversight by a Being big enough to bring about perfect justice; there is really no overarching reason to abide by the resultant socially constructed morality that we so often try to follow. If I get promoted at work or get fired for fraud, in a few years I’ll be dead and nobody will care. And who cares if anyone did care. They’ll soon be dead too. I’m thankful, oh so thankful, that God not only exists but is sustaining, ruling over, and providing for his world and all therein.
Chapter 6: Beyond Nihilism: Existentialism
The answer to the inescapable Nihilism of honest Naturalism is Existentialism. Brilliant. The overriding fact of meaninglessness, nausea of inescapable nothingness, is finding small, subjective, personal, individualistic points of meaning, punctiliar moments of import in one’s life. Enter Existentialism. Meaning, value is created by humans in their revolt against the absurdity, meaninglessness of the world into which they are born.
The irony of this is that it begs the question. If there is not overall meaning or objective value, then all individual, personal, created meanings or value, no matter how valuable or significant they feel or subjectively seem, are still meaningless. Existentialism, then, is a philosophical effort to cope with the world that Naturalism leaves us. This stinks of copout. I like Sire’s conclusion: “Does atheistic existentialism transcend nihilism? It certainly tries to with passion and conviction. Yet it fails to provide a referent for a morality that goes beyond each individual.” In Theistic Existentialism, one’s way of creating an authentic existence is to take a leap of faith in God, despite a lack of unambiguous evidence.
Chapter 7: Journey to the East: Eastern Pantheistic Monism
The dismal outlook of not only Nihilism, at worst, but also Existentialism, at best, lead many to look elsewhere for a plausible knowledge of our world—namely, looking East. Doctrine and “truth” seems less relevant in the Eastern religious mindset. Technique is much more important. Ultimately, all roads lead to the same ultimate reality. Metaphysical union with the Ultimate, the One, is the goal of mental exercise and meditation. To lose one’s own personality is necessary for oneness with the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-sustaining Ultimate Reality.
The principle of Karma is unyielding. If you sin there is no confession, repentance and the blotting out of transgression. You reap what, exactly what, and nothing less than what you have sown.
Chapter 8: A Separate Universe: The New Age-Spirituality without Religion
For Westerners who “want out” of the philosophical merry-go-round, and yet who don’t exactly want to become a Buddhist monk, for example, New Age Spirituality is often viewed as an option. It may appear that New Age is more like Old Gnosticism in much of its ideas. The New Age that is coming, is seen as a sort of “Kingdom come,” an age of unprecedented wholeness, health, and wellbeing. So far, however, the drug revolution and yoga spas have yet to usher in this new world. Here are a few elements of the New Age mysticism:
The universe is filled with spirit beings, and a Highest Spirit Being.
These spirits are various in temperament, some vicious and some kind.
The evil spirits need to be appeased and the good ones enticed to help people out.
We can learn to communicate with and in some ways control the spirit world.
Personally, it’s fascinating how that many of the features of the New Consciousness are satisfied better in Christianity. Death isn’t the end of being; there is a spiritual and physical dimensions to reality; and that we can tap into such dimensions with force (i.e. prayer, for Christians). But of course, the New Consciousness has no Christian God with whom to reckon. And that is mighty convenient.
Chapter Nine: The Vanished Horizon: Postmodernism
The Postmodern mind is tired of the rigidity of Naturalism, Nihilism, and Existentialism, and seeks to question what can be known for certain at all. The question ceases to be “Which worldview is correct?” to “Whatever worldview fits you is fine for you, to the best of our knowledge of the definition of ‘Worldview’ and ‘fine.’” It throws off the dogmatism of any would-be truth claims and calls it all into question, though perhaps for different reasons that the rational skeptics of old. “According to postmodernism, nothing we think we know can be checked against reality as such.” Since no Truth can be known for sure, little truths from our own experience are its replacement. And this is fine, unless any one narrative is treated as a metanarrative to interpret them all. That’s oppressive. Knowledge, ethics, and the personal self are all constructs, linguistically created according to one’s own whim.
Chapter 10: A View from the Middle East: Islamic Theism
Islam seems simple, compared to other worldviews. It’s far more straightforward. There is one God, Allah. The greatest sin is shirk, which is idolatry, or association of Allah with anything creaturely. The alleged incarnation of God as Jesus the human prophet is shirk. For Jesus was a man, and must not be confused with sharing a divine essence with Allah. Allah is transcendent: completely outside of space and time. There is no talk, as in Christian Theism, that God indwells an individual. Sure, Allah can be known, prayed to, and worshipped, but he is separate, though close at hand to those who are very pious.
It’s also interesting that in contrast to Christianity, Islam holds that “He loves the people who love Him and forgives their sins,” as opposed to loving humans first, who then love him in return. It appears to me that in all the areas of agreement that Islam shares with Christianity (e.g. many aspects of creation, the spirit world, God’s perfect and transcendent nature, and basic ethics) it’s the Christian gospel that is missing. Obviously, but for real. There’s no savior there. There is no way to know the Father, so to speak. And for this reason the work-based, moralistic, and legalistic Islamic faith often reigns with a rod of iron wherever it is found.
Chapter 11: The Examined Life
Everyone has a worldview, and all are incomplete. I realize my own culpability in reading this catalogue of worldviews: at times I sympathized with some aspects of a number of different errant perspectives. My worldview is not as comprehensive, biblical, and convictional as I’d like to assume. I too often live under the weight of hidden Deistic assumptions, with Naturalistic tendencies, and Nihilistic results. In countless ways, the Christian gospel I “know and believe” is the way out of the Nihilism that so many other worldviews have been developed in order to remedy. Islam is little better, in that it has a God but no Christ. No Savior. No sin-bearer. And little hope—at least as compared to the gospel Jesus taught. I trust that my own worldview has been not only challenged but more finely-tuned, internally consistent with itself, and externally consistent with God’s authoritative word.
Conclusion
In conclusion, James Sire’s exploration of ten distinct worldviews serves as a thought-provoking journey through the landscape of human belief systems. Each chapter describes and critiques the core questions and answers that shape common perspectives on life, morality, and existence. From Christian Theism's profound belief in a loving God to the existential quest for personal meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe, these worldviews act as diverse lenses through which our neighbors see the world. Amid this diversity, the Christian gospel emerges as a unique beacon of hope, offering salvation, purpose, and a path out of nihilism. The Universe Next Door is a helpful guide to these worldviews and to reflecting on our own ideological commitments. Take up and read, and be challenging to seek greater internal coherence and external alignment with what God has revealed. ❖
