Inquiry and Ideas
Worldview: The Model Running Your Life
The demand to “think for yourself” leaves a difficult question unanswered: what is doing the thinking before you become conscious of your assumptions? Worldview: The Model Running Your Life approaches a worldview as a dynamic…
By Chaplain Eric Kline, BA, MTS
About this book
The demand to “think for yourself” leaves a difficult question unanswered: what is doing the thinking before you become conscious of your assumptions? Worldview: The Model Running Your Life approaches a worldview as a dynamic operating model of reality rather than a static inventory of beliefs. Family, culture, experience, education, emotional investments, and repeated choices shape this model. It filters evidence, makes some explanations seem obvious, and predisposes decisions long before we have articulated our reasons.
The book argues that maturity requires more than defending inherited convictions or abandoning them whenever challenged. It requires corrigibility: the willingness and ability to examine the model, identify distortions, and revise judgments when better evidence warrants change. Engineering and scientific analogies help illustrate this process, including the cumulative effects of stress and repeated small compromises. These analogies illuminate aspects of human formation without suggesting that people are literally machines or that scientific models settle moral questions by themselves.
Worldview also considers the social consequences of unexamined assumptions. Our interpretations of other people, institutions, moral obligations, and even our failures can be shaped by the framework we rarely notice. Readers are invited to distinguish observation from inference, emotional certainty from justified confidence, and temporary agreement from durable understanding. This is not an invitation to convictionless skepticism or a promise of effortless transformation. It is a practical and intellectually serious case for the examined life: hold meaningful beliefs, understand the model beneath them, and remain willing to correct what does not withstand scrutiny.
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About the author
Eric Kline also writes under the name E. Vince.