Brad Alles

People can believe whatever they want, but that doesn’t make it true. I can believe that I can fly, but when I fall off the roof instead of zooming through the sky, the truth (and the ground) smacks me in the face. So it is with worldviews. You can believe what you want—but is it true? The issue is not whether a belief is religious or scientific—the question is whether it is true or not. Using the correspondence theory of truth—a philosophical belief that a statement is true if it corresponds to the facts of reality—let’s set up some tests for worldviews.

The first test of a worldview is this: does it fit the facts, or is there any evidence to support it? Using the American Heritage Dictionary, truth is defined as “conformity to knowledge, fact, actuality, or logic.” When Christianity claims to be true, the proper question is, “Are there any facts to back up the claims of the Christian religion?” Later we will see that there are historical, archaeological, and geographical facts to certify this as true. Returning to the map analogy for worldviews: if I am reading my map correctly, and my map says that turning right leads to my house, my house had better be there! The truth fits the facts, so a worldview has to fit the facts as well, since it claims to explain the world.