I hope you are enjoying Dennis Miller's book, "Discipling Nations", The Power of Truth to Transform Cultures. I think he does an incredible job articulating how people view the world. The following is his explanation of the three major worldviews found on pages 40 and 41 of his book. If you are not reading this book, I hope it wets your appetite to purchase the book and begin reading it.
All worldviews can be found somewhere along a continuum, with secularism and animism at either end and theism in the middle.
While secularism goes back to the ancients, its modern roots were planted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Secularism sees reality as ultimately physical and thus focuses on the unity of nature. Darwin, one of the great high priests of secularism, believed that life is the result of the interactions of matter and energy, time and chance. Secularists affirm that truth is empirical. Truth is what senses can perceive. Morals are relative. Values emerge from social consensus. As a religion, secularism is pantheistic, since it equates god with the laws of the universe. The cry of the secularist might be, "Everything is God!" This is philosophical materialism. Matter is the only and fundamental reality; all being, processes, and phenomena are explained as manifestations of matter. During the Enlightment these ideas received the label "secular humanism."
Theism is rooted in the ancient Near East. Theism sees ultimate reality as personal and relational. God exists. He created a universe of physical and spiritual dimensions, seen and unseen worlds. Truth, as revealed by God, is objective and can be known by man. God's character establishes absolute morals. Theism holds to one personal-infinite God, the great "I AM" of Scripture. Philosophical theism believes that the one God created man and the world. God transcends the world yet is immanent in it.
Animism (including its modern for, the New Age) is rooted in the Far East and the world's folk religions. Animism sees ultimate reality as spiritual. Spirits animate everything, and everything moves toward oneness of spirit. The real world is unseen, truth is hidden and irrational, all is mystery. While filled with evil, the universe is basicaly amoral. Monistic, animism asserts that there is only one kind of ultimate substance. The animist might cry, "All is one!" This is philosophical idealism, which maintains that ultimate reality lies in a realm that transcends worldly phenomena; essentially, reality is consciousness.
