Imagine you are me for a moment.

I overheard a conversation on the bus today between a man and a lady. The man was organizing a talk he had to give at a national symposium of...off-color science, metaphysics, the paranormal (I can't remember the words he used). The man's talk had something to do with an experiment done a hundred years ago by some scientists on an entire city. With radio waves, they projected some information about a few elements of the periodic table (weight, mass, atomic number), and what they found is that most individuals in the city knew this information. What's more, one of the elements was fictitious and they knew this fictitious information as well.

Of course, I'm half asleep on the bus, so I didn't jump into the conversation, but I couldn't help wonder what all this was about. The research sounds like hard data to be trusted. What then do I do with it? Recently I had been studying about the empty tomb of Jesus (Easter), how he appeared to many. Some say they all just hallucinated him, but that's weak. But maybe it was a radio wave phenomenon....

But then I realized what I was doing (and this is the subject of my blog). I was asking myself this question:

"How does this information fit into my worldview?"

Watch the power of worldviews in action:

Christian: Does this violate anything I know about in the Bible? If so, something must be wrong with what I just heard (perhaps the real data is statistically insignificant, perhaps people learned the periodic table in school beforehand, perhaps this guy just read a book by a loony, etc.). If not, maybe the ability to "hear" radio waves is a God-designed sense (like geomagnetism in homing pigeons or echolocation in bats) and we're just now discovering this.

Atheist: Does this violate any of the precepts I hold close, such as: there is no supernatural, there is no mind/body dualism, there is no such thing as hocus-pocus, science is our most reliable measure of truth. Has science conclusively shown that people cannot detect radio waves? If so, this guy's a loony. He's probably easily swayed by his belief in the supernatural. Perhaps the experiment was rigged, perhaps it wasn't conducted in a scientific manner (with double-blind tests, or reporting honestly). If this experiment checks out, maybe this is a new direction in our human evolution.

Spiritualist: Does this violate any of the precepts I hold close, such as there is no one way to acquire truth, there are multiple truths, no one person can claim all source of truth, there exists a spiritual world and we can communicate with spirits in it. Are radio waves a device or method of enhancing our communication with the dead? In this experiment, were there reports of raised paranormal events or sightings?

Can you see how our thought processes are guided by our worldview? The bus is an interesting mix of a wide variety of people. You can see the breadth of different questions that were no doubt asked by those near enough to this man to hear. The important point to take home here is: which worldview has the greatest probability of leading you to the truth?

Having studied many, many worldviews, I am convinced that Jesus as revealed in the Bible is the source of all truth, and apart from Him, we are totally lost. The claims of the Bible can be verified textually, historically, scientifically, and philosophically. All the requisites for rational thought and the scientific method can be found in the Bible. Only the Bible objectively states that truth exists and can be found. Only the Bible gives an objective reason for why seeking truth is a good thing to do.

As evangelicals (and all people who call themselves Christians should be evangelicals, see Matthew 28), we are in the business of worldview-changing, or at least worldview-selling.  A person rarely changes his worldview.  They define in part who the person is.  Only by the direct and specific power of God will someone change their worldview to the Biblical Christianity that saves.

The man mentioned something about theosophists. I don't know if he is one, or the conference he is attending is one, or what. But after reading up on what they are, I can see how this radio wave stuff can tie in with that. Theosophists see that religion is a major characteristic of homo sapiens, and therefore believe a spiritual world exists, and therefore are interested in systematically studying all religions to get to the closest approximation of truth. This includes studying alien abductions, ghosts, other paranormal stuff, and "off-beat" science like radio waves, for they all contain an element of the truth of this "beyondness."

Lastly, I just wanted to say that I completely misrepresented what the man on the bus said. By the time I wrote this blog I had forgotten the majority of the details, but still wanted the illustration, so I fabricated what I needed to convey a coherent thought to get you all to think and challenge yourselves. Real topics this freaky do exist, though. There is a whole-day seminar on these topics coming up soon somewhere. "Big name" people in this field will be there, and they treat it very seriously. If you look around, you will probably find a real example (I couldn't find my example online) and it will challenge you just as this has. But don't propagate the fiction I wrote above.