That is no call to discard that revealed truth, but to constantly audit our grasp of that truth.
Christians (of the evangelical kind) have no monopoly on truth - we merely know who is the Truth, and that he has revealed some of it to us. We should not pit arrogance against arrogance, or triumphalistic certainty against triumphalistic certainty. Many people think that a Christian worldview is just as incredulous. Pantheism can alert is to this without our needing to become pantheists.Caveat 3 - humility is an antedote to our incredulity as we read about the worldviews of others. Or, again, we may fail to appreciate the interconnectedness of the created order and our fellowship with it. For example, many Christians may fail to see the apparent pointlessness of life in many situations (despite Ecclesiates), whereas nihilistic writings may alert us to this viewpoint. Sire does no more than provide a framework or a basis from which we can view and learn about those worldviews.Caveat 2 - Don't think that Christians have nothing to learn from other worldviews, or from their practitioners. To think, for example, that every existentialist is exactly as Sire describes them is simplistic.
If the book has any weakness, it is in the way it is used by its readers.Caveat 1 - each worldview presented has many more nuances than Sire is able to present. Each of them would need a large book to examine it and its relationship to Christian theism. As an introduction, the book orients the reader to where people might be coming from, and provides the mental tools to be able to begin to identify worldviews and why they are unacceptable from a Christian and from a rational point of view.I am sure there are shortcomings in Sire's presentation of each of the worldviews.
Although some complain that it is overly academic, I think that anyone who has studied the sciences or humanities at a tertiary level should be able to pick their way through the worldviews. Eastern Pantheistic Monism is included by Sire because (presumably) it had a big influence on Western culture during the 1960s and into the New Age movement.The strength of this book is that it serves as an introduction. UND is a book about Western world views - you'll need to read missiological literature for an examination of Islamic, animist or other world views. I read the first edition of this book as an undergraduate, and it provided a valuable guide to the concept of worldview - that people arrive at different conclusions about the world because they have different basic assumptions.
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