by:  Susan L Young

To know where I am going, I first look from whence I come and discover that I am heir to a legacy of beliefs that until recently, I have been almost totally unaware.  The very foundation on which I have based my life has been set in concrete long before my birth.  Expanding my vocabulary to include such terms as worldview and modernity, my first task appears to be dissect these concepts, identifying which elements I have blindly adhered to, where they came from and if they are valid or not.
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Worldview is the way in which one perceives the world encompassing how we see five major issues:

• Human nature – is the glass half full or half empty?
• Society – basically good or evil?
• Time or history – linear or cyclical?
• God or the ultimate reality – is there or isn’t there?
• The relationship between human beings and the natural world – are we part of or in charge of it? (Grelle 2003)

I discover that my worldview can be traced back to events of the 15th and 16th century, when the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo turned the world upside down by proposing that the planets and the sun did not revolve around the earth.  This changed how the Western world viewed nature and the role of human beings on this earth.  Suddenly, science had elevated mankind to a position of near deity.  All of nature and life on this earth was relegated to a position of utility, seen to have value only in how it well it served the needs of humans.
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This anthropocentric view was promoted in the writings of Bacon, Descartes, Newton and other scientists and philosophers who believed only humans to possess a soul and saw the rest of the creation as a mechanism that functioned by inflexible laws.  All the magic of the unknown was believed to be within the reach of science, given enough time and luck.  The modern thinkers believed that if enough of nature’s secrets could be extracted, than humans could meld her (nature) to their purposes (Kinsley 1995).