Six Worldviews That Rule The World
Lesson Overview
Six Worldviews That Rule the World with Dr. David Noebel
This standalone message is given by Dr. David Noebel, founder of Summit Ministries and author of the worldview textbook Understanding the Times. It is his flagship lecture: the argument that a small number of worldviews, each answering the same set of basic questions, compete for the hearts and minds of the world, and that Christian young people need to understand all of them. Use this overview to review the key points after watching the full video. The lecture is from around 2009, and its economic and political examples reflect that moment.
The Battle of Ideas
Noebel begins with 2 Corinthians 10:4-5, where Paul says believers “demolish arguments” and take “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” He argues Christians are not anti-reason; God made a rational universe. The task is to examine every idea in light of Christ. His concern is that many young people lose their faith at college, and he reads a letter from a grieving mother whose daughter walked away from her faith at a secular university as his example of the stakes.
His diagnosis is that Christians often recognize what “liberal” means in theology but have no idea what it means in philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology, sociology, law, politics, economics, or history, and so are unprepared for what they meet in the classroom.
Six Numbers and Six Worldviews
To answer the charge that reducing the world to six worldviews is oversimplifying, Noebel points to the atheist astronomer Sir Martin Rees, whose book Just Six Numbers argues that six physical constants define the universe. Noebel walks through several of these finely tuned numbers (the ratio of electrical force to gravity, the efficiency of hydrogen fusion at 0.007, the density of matter) and notes that if any were slightly different, the universe or life could not exist.
He uses this “fine-tuning” argument to make two points: that the universe appears designed, and that if six numbers can define the physical universe, six worldviews can define the human one. He cites the case of the philosopher Antony Flew, once one of the world’s leading atheists, who came to accept a designer late in life (becoming a deist, not a Christian) and wrote the book There Is a God. Noebel presents Flew as an honest inquirer who followed the evidence. (The fine-tuning argument is a widely used design argument; students should know that scientists and philosophers debate it, and that Flew’s late-life shift is likewise discussed and disputed.)
What a Worldview Is
Noebel defines a worldview as “a bundle of ideas, beliefs, convictions, and values.” Drawing on C.S. Lewis, he notes that in all of history there have really been only three basic theologies: theism, atheism, and pantheism (he points to Paul encountering all three in Acts 17). Every complete worldview, he argues, must say something in ten disciplines: theology, philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology, sociology, law, politics, economics, and history.
He names the six worldviews his textbook analyzes: Christianity, Islam, Secular Humanism, Marxism, Cosmic Humanism (the New Age), and Postmodernism. Six worldviews across ten disciplines yields, in his framing, sixty ideas that “rule the world.” He argues these sixty ideas are learnable, and that no Christian teenager should set foot on a campus without a working grasp of them.
Ideas Have Consequences
Noebel supports his thesis with Lord Acton, who held that a few dozen currents of thought provide the key to modern history, and who in the 1890s roughly predicted the twentieth century by combining the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Noebel argues the twentieth century became the bloodiest in history, and that ideas, not mere circumstances, put people in the grave. He makes the pointed claim that none of the ideas behind that century’s mass killing were Christian ideas. He grounds the primacy of ideas theologically in Christ as the Logos of John 1, through whom all things were made, so that creation itself is an expression of the ideas of God.
He argues that all ten disciplines are therefore “sacred,” not secular: to be human is to be a theological, philosophical, ethical, and economic being, made in God’s image. He notes that when he has asked Christian students to mark each discipline “secular” or “sacred,” most mark them secular, which he considers exactly the mistake.
A Closer Look: Economics
For his remaining time Noebel focuses on economics, the area people least expect the Bible to address. He argues Scripture says a great deal about it, citing John Wesley’s rule (“earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can”), the “masterpiece of common sense” in Proverbs, Proverbs 11:1 that “dishonest weights are an abomination to the Lord,” and Proverbs 31:16, where the capable woman buys a field and plants a vineyard, which he uses to argue the Bible honors women’s economic agency. He closes the biblical side with Ephesians 4:28, that the former thief should work with his hands so as to have something to share.
From the biblical principle of honest weights, Noebel builds an argument for a standard of value for money (historically gold and silver, which he notes the U.S. Constitution names), and criticizes government ownership of industry and the abandonment of a monetary standard. This is his economic-policy view, in the tradition of hard-money and free-market thought, and it is a contested position within economics rather than a settled biblical teaching. Students should recognize it as one school of economic thought.
The Fabian Argument and Its Contested Claims
Noebel then traces what he calls interventionism or Keynesianism. He highlights the year 1883 (the death of Marx, the birth of economist John Maynard Keynes, and the founding of the Fabian Society) and explains the Fabian strategy as pursuing socialism gradually, by “evolution” rather than revolution, while (in his telling) sharing the same end goal as revolutionary Marxism. He traces a line from the Fabian Society to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (1905), to the League for Industrial Democracy under John Dewey, and into present-day American politics.
Two cautions for students are important here.
First, this section makes strong, contested political claims, including labeling four caucuses of the U.S. House as socialist organizations and naming specific living members of Congress. These are Noebel’s partisan characterizations from around 2009, not neutral fact; the people and groups named would dispute them, and this overview does not reproduce the roster of individual accusations as established fact. The claim that Fabian gradualism and Marxism share an identical goal is also a contested interpretation, not a consensus of historians.
Second, and more seriously, in this section Noebel relays lurid, graphic, and defamatory accusations about the personal life of John Maynard Keynes, drawn from a polemical source, including an accusation of the sexual abuse of children. This overview deliberately omits those accusations. They are not part of the economic argument, they are sourced to a discredited polemic rather than to sound biography, and repeating them would spread a defamatory and unfounded claim about a real person. The economic ideas associated with Keynes can be described and critiqued (Noebel labels the interventionist position and disagrees with it) without any of that material, and that is how the overview handles it.
He closes with C.S. Lewis, who argued in a 1940s essay that economic independence undergirds a “free-born mind” and warned against the state becoming everyone’s schoolmaster and employer. Noebel applies this to a warning that Christian and home schooling may face pressure from an expanding government.
The Conclusion
Noebel’s summary is that the Christian worldview speaks to all ten areas, that all ten are sacred rather than secular, and that the church must ground its young people in every one of them. He notes that different students will be drawn to different disciplines, and that the body of Christ needs Christian theologians, philosophers, economists, historians, scientists, and the rest, each thinking Christianly in their field.
Key Terms
Worldview: a bundle of ideas, beliefs, convictions, and values that answers life’s basic questions.
The ten disciplines: theology, philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology, sociology, law, politics, economics, and history.
The six worldviews: Christianity, Islam, Secular Humanism, Marxism, Cosmic Humanism (New Age), and Postmodernism.
Fine-tuning: the argument that the universe’s physical constants are precisely set for life to exist.
Fabian socialism: a gradualist approach to socialism, pursuing its aims through institutions over time.
Interventionism (Keynesianism): the economic school, associated with Keynes, that Noebel critiques in favor of a monetary standard and free markets.
Verses to Know
2 Corinthians 10:4-5, demolishing arguments and taking every thought captive. John 1:1-3, Christ the Logos, through whom all things were made. Acts 17, Paul encountering theism, atheism, and pantheism at Athens. Proverbs 11:1, dishonest weights are an abomination to the Lord. Proverbs 31:16, the capable woman who buys a field. Ephesians 4:28, working with one’s hands in order to give.
Takeaway
Noebel argues that just six worldviews, each answering the same ten questions, compete for the world, that ideas have real consequences for good or ill, and that Christians must understand every one of these sixty ideas and think Christianly in every discipline, because no area of life is truly secular.