Wouldn’t the danger of this approach be that it makes permissible conclusions that are contrary to scripture? For example an inductive approach to understanding sexuality would catalog same-sex sexual interactions and ambiguous sexual categories in the animal kingdom to make normative claims about human sexuality that would contradict Biblical teaching. On the other hand, a Christian worldview approach allows those observations to be bracketed due to the Bible’s teachings of man’s unique moral stature.
In other words, how is an “inductive” approach different from a “secular” approach?
Exactly! That is the risk. I call it the risk of thinking.
The problem if you don’t allow the possibility of induction is like this: Let’s say you say traditional marriage is the right thing, and the only argument for it is from the Bible. Someone is going to do some induction on the nice gay people they meet and conclude that the Bible is wrong. If, on the other hand, you do natural law arguments for traditional marriage, from Robert George and the Catholics, to Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson talking about sexual difference, all of a sudden it looks like induction is on our side.
I’m no expert in this sort of thing, but it sounds like this is sort of relitigating Platonism vs Aristatilianism, and my reading on this was that the result of Aristotle coming out on top the first time was not good for the trajectory of Christianity. It also seems like the foundational framework that’s being operated within is a pragmatic one.
I know that pragmatism and particularism are both epistemologies that have “won” in the marketplace of ideas, but that doesn’t baptize them into alignment with revelation or with the character of God.
It seems to me that we have two worldviews “warring in our members” as Paul said (Romans 7:23) There is the troubling unintentional worldview we all have constructed from our experiences to date which, as you say, is a concession to subjectivism. The other is a worldview built intentionally from the reading of scripture, fellowship with faithful saints, and Face-to-face encounters with God. The first is fraught with untruth by virtue of its source in the perceptions of our humanity, but the second is as truthful as the measure of our commitment to Christ’s discipleship.
There is a third sense of the term worldview found in the “isms” of our culture. We can see them displayed on the spines of books in the library. Capitalism and Communism, Calvinism and Arminianism, Evangelicalism and Catholicism, (etc ad nauseum) are all the spouting of formal worldviews of which no one believes in their entirety. They are usually (universally?) descriptions of the author’s idealism.
Wouldn’t the danger of this approach be that it makes permissible conclusions that are contrary to scripture? For example an inductive approach to understanding sexuality would catalog same-sex sexual interactions and ambiguous sexual categories in the animal kingdom to make normative claims about human sexuality that would contradict Biblical teaching. On the other hand, a Christian worldview approach allows those observations to be bracketed due to the Bible’s teachings of man’s unique moral stature.
In other words, how is an “inductive” approach different from a “secular” approach?
Exactly! That is the risk. I call it the risk of thinking.
The problem if you don’t allow the possibility of induction is like this: Let’s say you say traditional marriage is the right thing, and the only argument for it is from the Bible. Someone is going to do some induction on the nice gay people they meet and conclude that the Bible is wrong. If, on the other hand, you do natural law arguments for traditional marriage, from Robert George and the Catholics, to Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson talking about sexual difference, all of a sudden it looks like induction is on our side.
I find that people who aren’t Christian are much more likely to come along for the ride, if we make it permissible to disagree with us. I wrote about this in, “A Falsifiable Faith”: https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/a-falsifiable-faith?r=k9yk0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I’m no expert in this sort of thing, but it sounds like this is sort of relitigating Platonism vs Aristatilianism, and my reading on this was that the result of Aristotle coming out on top the first time was not good for the trajectory of Christianity. It also seems like the foundational framework that’s being operated within is a pragmatic one.
I know that pragmatism and particularism are both epistemologies that have “won” in the marketplace of ideas, but that doesn’t baptize them into alignment with revelation or with the character of God.
It seems to me that we have two worldviews “warring in our members” as Paul said (Romans 7:23) There is the troubling unintentional worldview we all have constructed from our experiences to date which, as you say, is a concession to subjectivism. The other is a worldview built intentionally from the reading of scripture, fellowship with faithful saints, and Face-to-face encounters with God. The first is fraught with untruth by virtue of its source in the perceptions of our humanity, but the second is as truthful as the measure of our commitment to Christ’s discipleship.
There is a third sense of the term worldview found in the “isms” of our culture. We can see them displayed on the spines of books in the library. Capitalism and Communism, Calvinism and Arminianism, Evangelicalism and Catholicism, (etc ad nauseum) are all the spouting of formal worldviews of which no one believes in their entirety. They are usually (universally?) descriptions of the author’s idealism.