Based upon Scott B. Rae's Moral Choices. This is designed to be a simplified and accessible aid for Christians interested in exploring contemporary moral issues from a biblical perspective.

2. Morality and
your Worldview

3. Your Worldview is
the lens through
which you view
the world

4. Your Worldview is
the lens through
which you view
the world
Explaining how you see the world

5. •The Barna Group, in association with Summit
Ministries, conducted a survey of practicing
Christians in the USA to determine how they
were in
fl
uenced by worldview
.
•Younger Christians were much more likely to
accept unbiblical worldviews than previous
generations.

6. •38% of practicing Christians are sympathetic to
some teachings of Islam
.
•28% believe that “all people pray to the same god
or spirit.”

8. •23% believe that “what is morally right or wrong
depends on what an individual believes.
”
•20% believe that “meaning and purpose comes
from working hard.”

9. Morality is important because moral
questions are at the heart of most of the
important issues in life.
Morality helps us distinguish between right
and wrong and justify our answer.

10. Out of this we ask questions like:
• What is a good person?
• What things are morally praiseworthy?
• What is a good life?
• What would a good society look like?

11. These questions are fundamental to your
worldview, your worldview depends upon
your answer to these questions.

12. Political science, medical science, business
practices, economics, religion and theology
have a great a
ff
ect on such thinking.

13. Your worldview explains how you view the
metaphysics, asking questions about what is
real and how you view reality.

14. Metaphysics means, “beyond the physical”
and deals with what exists:
- is it just the physical world (naturalism), or
do things exist outside the physical realm?

15. Wikipedia is a free content,
multilingual online
encyclopedia written and maintained
by a community of
volunteers through a model of open
collaboration, using a wiki-based
editing system. It is the largest and
most-read reference work in history.

16. Metaphysics is the branch
of philosophy that studies the
fi
rst
principles of being, identity and change,
space and time, causality, necessity and
possibility. It includes questions about
the nature of consciousness and the
relationship between mind and matter.

17. •Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is
for something to exist and what types of
existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer,
in an abstract and fully general manner, the
questions
:
•What is there
?
•What is it like?

18. •Topics of metaphysical investigation
include existence, objects and
their properties, space and time, cause and effect,
and possibility. Metaphysics is considered one of
the four main branches of philosophy, along
with epistemology, logic, and ethics.

19. Worldviews also involve thinking about
epistemology (from Greek for the study of
knowledge), and asks about how we know
what we know.

20. Worldviews also involve thinking about
anthropology (from Greek for the study of
man [humanity]), and asks about what a
person is (and by extension what happens
after death):
Is a person just a collection of body parts, of
the physical, or is there an immaterial part,
like the soul?

21. The answers to these questions come
together to form your worldview—hopefully
your answers are consistent and produce a
coherent viewpoint which is morally
consistent.

22. Metaphysics: If God exists your morality
must be consistent with that view.
So, if God created the world morality was
built into its framework by Him.
If there is no God morality is a human
invention and is determined from that
perspective.

23. Anthropology: If God exists your morality
must be consistent with that view.
If you are a naturalist then humans exist as
parts with no lasting e
ff
ect through time.
Bioethics are a
ff
ected by how we view
humanity—what is a person, when does
personhood start / end etc.?

24. Epistemology is also important for
understanding how you come to know your
moral obligations.
An epistemological skeptic might hold that
even if morality does exist, human beings
cannot know its demands.

25. An epistemological realist might conclude
that morality can be known and what we can
know does correspond to what actually
exists. How, speci
fi
cally, it can be known
helps to distinguish a divine command view
of morality from a natural law view.

26. So, a Christian worldview says there is
genuine moral knowledge.
Naturalism questions this reality—they
argue all reality is what can be perceived
with your own senses.
This means that moral belief is, like religious
belief, a matter of opinion and is not
veri
fi
able.

27. A theist would argue that moral knowledge
is genuine, just like scienti
fi
c knowledge, it is
not a matter of subjective opinion or
personal belief.
Rae concludes, “The theist argues that no
one consistently lives as if morality is
entirely subjective and that moral truths do
exist and can be known.”