What’s Your Worldview?: An Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions by James N. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a unique book, a choose-your-own-adventure book—yes, just like the ones you read when you were a kid, but written as non-fiction on an excessively serious topic: worldview. The author asks binary questions on major issues—is there a God? Yes or no?—and asks you to follow your train of tihnking to dead ends he creates when he offers a critique of the worldview you most likely fall into.
I like this book for what it is: a novel approach to Christian apologetics that I do believe I could hand to an unbeliever who is thoughtful—but not abundantly so. That is, I’m not sure this is the book for the philosophy major at State U; Anderson didn’t aim it that high. It’s for someone who probably hasn’t thought about his worldview as a worldview, someone who doesn’t realize that his characteristic answers to worldview questions are gelling into something sort of coherent.
The value of the book is its brevity: I read it as fast as any book I’ve ever read. It flowed very naturally and quickly. The detriment of this book is, also, its brevity: dedicated adherents of any given worldview will feel that their viewpoint was dispatched with too few shots fired.
And I’m certain any of those adherents could turn around and level the-problem-of-evil (or evolution, or empirical pluralism) at Christianity and feel they’d successfully bumped off Anderson’s worldview at least as well as he dismissed theirs.
But I think Anderson really does get to the heart of the various worldviews he tackles. Without listing every possible objection to each of them, he narrows in on the really big problems. Like, if skepticism is true, how can anyone know it? And if relativism is true, how can we say so without being guilty of claiming an absolute?
A little afterword answers a few objections to Anderson’s overall method, but he never really does get around to advancing a specifically Christian apologetic. That doesn’t seem to be the purpose of the book. He’ just knocking down other worldviews—graciously, I thought—to prepare for further discussion of the Christian worldview.
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