Worldviews and Thinking Skills

Are there significant relationships between thinking skills (creative, critical, scientific, problem solving,...) and worldviews?

        In some ways YES, because each of us has a worldview — our view of the world, used for living in the world — that influences the way we think and what we conclude, especially in some very important areas of life.
        But in many ways NO, because no worldview has a monopoly on logical thinking (or illogical thinking), and similarities in our thinking are much more important than differences.

        For example,
        a website about atheism-and-agnosticism offers a set of excellent pages, mostly by Austin Cline, about Skepticism & Critical Thinking;  the second section, about Logic and Critical Thinking, provides good advice about thinking skills (and other interesting links are above, below, and to the sides);
        but you can find similar good advice about thinking skills from Christian Logic and Virtual Salt, in Christians & Critical Thinking;
        and a page about Christian Apologetics & Postmodern Relativism explains that each person can find evidence (historical, scientific, personal, and interpersonal) for various worldviews, but not logical proof.

        Collins, Dawkins, McGrath:  Sometimes intelligent, well informed, rational people disagree, as you can see when Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins were interviewed together by TIME Magazine (with introduction by David Van Biema) and separately by Terry Gross of NPR (Dawkins & Collins), and in a debate between Richard Dawkins and Alistair McGrath — audio (Part 1 & Part 2) and video.

        And More
        A debate in April 2009 — William Lane Craig (Christian theist) vs Cristopher Hitchens (atheist) — is summarized by Doug Geivett.

I.O.U. — Later, these ideas will be examined in more depth and breadth (for uses of logical evaluation in critical thinking, plus process-of-science,...) and there will be more links to high-quality resources on the web.

Copyright © 2007 by Craig Rusbult, all rights reserved