The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog

Sire opens the chapter with a quote from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire…”.

Although there may appear to be an infinite number of worldviews, Sire writes that this is deceptive because the basic questions have only “a limited number of answers” (269). Most worldviews apart from the ones treated in the book (e.g., aestheticism or hedonism) turn out to be variations on the main worldviews. The consequence is that “our own personal choice lies somewhere on this field” (270).

Sire stakes the claim that the book’s argument implies two consequences for our choice of worldview:

1. Our choice can be well informed, not blind.
2. Whatever choice we make, consistency and honesty demand that we live by it.

In choosing a worldview, we should first adopt as our “working frame of reference” an attitude of humility (271) —a recognition of our “finitude” and intellectual limitations as human beings. Yet we should not let humility lapse into total skepticism. As human beings we do have the ability to know, and that implies that the laws of thought and reason are valid and must be followed.

According to Sire, this means that the worldview we choose should have three characteristics: