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Dallas Willard - The Nature and Necessity of Worldviews at UCLA
Dallas Willard - The Nature and Necessity of Worldviews at UCLA
Worldviews at UCLA
“An institution of higher education is, by definition, dedicated to the search for truth and its
dissemination”. Harvard had a little problem with this and they changed their shield several
times. Primarily they were troubled about the issue of the unity of truth and that is: Does truth
include the religious, the moral and the other dimensions of truth? Gradually through the
years there has been a drift in university affairs that relegates truth to just the natural world.
And so our ability to represent God, personal character of the human beings, spiritual side, all
of that is eliminated from knowledge. But, truth itself does not do that.
Truth does not accommodate belief; belief has to accommodate truth. No one has ever made a
proposition true simply by believing it. Now, maybe their belief in it caused them to act and to
bring something about, that made the proposition true. But, merely believing doesn’t make
propositions true. A group of people believing it doesn’t help get up a movement. It won’t make
it true.
The bitterness of truth is its total indifference to human will and desire together with the fact
that human desire and will is set on reshaping reality and therefore truth to suit itself. This is
the fundamental conflict in human life. It is the conflict between desire and will and truth. And
that conflict affects everything we do, including what we do on the university campus.
There is another world view, it is the one that founded the universities, and, intact dominated
the universities until about 75 years ago. That change has come very recently. It is a part of a
socialization process that is going on in history, a necessary one, in many respects, in which the
university had to divorce itself from the implicit institutions of religion and society.
(Recommends the book: The making of the modern university). It wasn’t that suddenly,
someone found out that Jesus was wrong. Nobody found that out. It was not discovered, it was
negotiated over a period of time in which people decided that it would be that way, and was
able to set the tone against it. That’s what happened.
1. Do you consider Intelligent Design and Creationism a Science? What is and isn’t science
shouldn’t be our fundamental question… Science, for me, is just a fancy word for
knowledge… To me the fundamental question is, for any of those ideas is: Are they
reasonable? Do they have strong support in the evidence? Do they fit together with a
coherent world view?
2. An atheist states: You use the words :knowledge of God”. I would argue that nobody can
read or know the Bible or the Koran really well and know the customs and prayers really
well and be sincere in their heart that it’s true, but how can one know God if one, can’t
know at the same time, that miracles don’t exist? Logically, those are independent issues.
You had many people who had standard arguments for the existence of God who had
rejected miracles. It depends on whether you’re going to be a deist or a full blown theist.
Christian theists tend to depend upon knowledge of miracles for their knowledge of God, at
least partly.
3. Dr. Willard, you had mentioned during the outlining of the secularization of the university
that it was necessarily so, and possibly indicating that it was a good thing. How will I, as a
person who does research in the sciences and yet, also have faith in Christ, integrate that
and is it wrong to do that? And if the segregation of faith and academy is a good thing? In
the period right after World War II, colleges and universities were thought not to be
training people well for the future of the country. They were concerned particularly about
technology, about science, but they were also concerned about international relations and
things like that. There was a lot of criticism and what they experienced was this: Nearly all
of the colleges and universities were closely aligned with denominations and what they
found was that the denominational distinctives were not open to inquiry. That is why there
had to be an opening up between institutional religion and inquiry. That is a good thing
because the truth claims of religion should be open to scrutiny as any other field.
Historically, religion has not been and that’s why there had to be some distance. Let’s open
it now. That is what I am complaining about now on the secular side, we don’t have it
(inquiry) because the secular side has trained itself to say that religion is not open to
inquiry. That’s the change that had to be made.
4. What steps do you think can be taken to encourage people to have open forums and do you
see the university going in a positive direction or a negative direction? In philosophy,
things have gotten considerably better in my lifetime.