| | | What Why is all about, for the Hermeneutical Circularities are everywhere. Buried in various places, including Ingratitude Risk and the Kulisz Hypothesis Of Christian Origins, are the beginnings of an explanation of the term. Some would no doubt say it's a Tall Story, surely nobody doubts that it's a tall order. It would be helpful as a preliminary step to have some agreement on What Is A Worldview. And let's makes one thing crystal clear from the start:
Life - and the pursuit of truth - without risk has never been an option
which was expressed as we considered the very risky label Borderline Conspiracy Theorist.
Best tested in extremis
This website about worldview is not primarily theoretical. It's about how any of us make Difficult Choices. That's partly why we look at Scary Areas of other people's choices under immense pressure, such as in the Third Reich:
... ambiguous resistance to the ambiguities of the establishment [worldview led to] the failure of the organized churches in the Third Reich. Their desperate attempts to survive as an established expression of religious faith and at the same time pay tribute to biblical principles left the churches deeply compromised. ... One does not have to live in a police state to face ethical dilemmas demanding civic courage or sound ethical judgement - as every university don, newspaper reporter, office worker or hospital nurse can testify, there are occasions in the course of a normal working week when difficult choices have to be made. Dictatorship naturally politicizes these choices and obliges individuals to ask: in what do I believe? How much am I willing to risk for those beliefs? My life?
-- Adam LeBor & Roger Boyes, p309, Surviving Hitler
Tellingly, Hitler himself was very interested in the word worldview, as mentioned in Clearer And Richer Concept.
Another very different example of an extremity in which risk management (or more simply very Difficult Choices) has abounded is the Indian Ocean Tsunami. We are interested at all levels of such human dilemmas, in order to create A Better World, as shown in Tsunami Risk Management.
Mathematical example
A cool example of someone very gifted willing to risk a lot of his life in pursuit of a "worldview" that seems to him valuable, but he knows may turn out to be worthless (or at least very far from wholly true). It is taken from the end of Michael Atiyah's introduction to Roger Penrose in The Geometric Universe.
It is clear that Roger is in a real sense one of the original thinkers of our time. Although he is aware of the mainstream work in theoretical physics he is continuously branching out on his own. He thinks deeply and when he has an idea that he thinks is worth developing he pursues it tenaciously over many years.
These days most physicists follow the latest band-wagon, usually within microseconds. Roger steers his own path and eschews band-wagons. He may not always be right but it is important that we have individuals who stick to their guns. Future progress with ideas, as in evolutionary genetics, depends on a sufficient stock so that some good ones will survive and prosper. Roger is one of those who are helping to diversify our "gene pool" of ideas.
A close examination of Roger's work shows that he manages to combine genuine physical insight with the development of beautiful mathematical techniques to go alongside. It is this close harmony of the physics and mathematics which persuades him that he is on to something worthwhile. He has been proved right in the past and will, I hope, be proved right in the future.
There's much more of the same to think about in The Road To Reality, which would also be a good title or at least aspiration for Why
The Jesus angle
The first section of The Blasphemy That Jesus Was Divine, from a debate on Wiki in 2000, sketches out why a certain amount of time spent forming a reasonable Hypothesis Of Christian Origins may be a reasonable move to make in each of our personal risk assessments. The history of Why also makes this an obvious thing to look at. A lot more could of course be said. Some of it will, some of it hopefully should be said, some of it even in exactly the right place. Eventually.
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