Every individual has their own personal worldview. It's also useful to think about cultural worldviews; these are the worldviews of a culture (overall) and of mini-cultures within the culture. A person is influenced by the worldviews of their culture and mini-cultures, but each person develops their own personally customized worldview, their uniquely distinctive view of the world.
A person's worldview
is affected by many factors — by their inherited characteristics,
plus their life-situations and background experiences (including effects from culture & mini-cultures, and other individuals), by the values, attitudes, and habits
they have developed, and more — and these
factors vary from one person to another. Therefore, even though some parts of a
worldview are shared by many people in a community, other parts differ for individuals, so worldviews (of different people) are shared yet unique.
Your worldview includes your answers for a wide
range of questions:
What are humans,
why we are here, and what is our purpose in life? What are your goals
for life? What aspects of life (and actions of life) are more important, and less important? When you make decisions about using time – and thus life – what
are your values and
priorities?
What can we know, and how? and
with how much certainty?
Does reality include only matter/energy,
or is there more?
Some worldview questions are about
God: Can we know whether God exists? Does
God exist? If
yes, what characteristics does God have, and what relationship with the universe?
Have miracles occurred in the past, as claimed in the Bible, and do they occur
now? Are natural events produced and guided by God? Was the
universe self-creating, or did God create it? Was it totally self-assembling
by natural process, or did God sometimes create in miraculous-appearing ways? Does
God communicate with us (mentally and spiritually) in everyday life, and through
written revelation, as in the Bible? What
is God's role in history? Is there
a purpose and meaning in history, for each of us individually and for all
of us together, or is life just a long string of things happening? What
(if anything) happens after death?
Because a worldview has multiple components – as in a person's views about these questions and others – it can be useful to think about a person's partial-worldviews that combine to form their total-worldview.
This website encourages you to think about worldview-questions, plus practical applications: How do worldviews affect decisions and actions in everyday life, for individuals and societies? What should we teach students about worldviews, and how, and why? How can you actualize your worldview, so the worldview you want to have (or claim to have) is the way you actually view the world, because it's the dominant influence that shapes your decisions and actions while you are living in the world?
This area looks at several aspects of World Views: Christian Stewardship of Life as a Worldview plus Christian Apologetics and the “tolerance” of Postmodern Relativism |
This home page for World
Views, written by Craig Rusbult, is
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/views/index.html