Worldview Matters V - Race to Witch Mountain

Why Does Worldview Matter? The Impact of Worldview V – Race to Witch Mountain

Worldview is the conceptual lens through which we see, understand, and interpret the world and our place within it. Worldview develops in and flows through the heart, the center of the human person, and necessarily involves answers (propositional or narrative) to four questions: What is our nature? What is our world? What is our problem? What is our end? Every person possesses a worldview that provides an answer or set of answers to these core worldview questions, but these individual worldviews can be compiled under broad categories.

But why does worldview matter? How does worldview affect us? Why bother learning about it as a concept, and one’s own worldview specifically? What does it have to do with life? Simply put, worldview matters because one’s worldview affects everything that one thinks and does, through confirmation bias, experiential accommodation, the pool of live options, and life motivation. We can see the impact of worldview displayed clearly even in popular culture: for example, consider the 2009 film Race to Witch Mountain.

Contemporary Cultural Worldview Meditation.

Race to Witch Mountain—How About Them Aliens?

In the 2009 action flick Race to Witch Mountain, Las Vegas cabbie Jack Bruno (played by Dwayne Johnson) is an alien skeptic in a town of gullible people. The movie opens with Bruno driving alien-believer Dr. Alex Friedman to a UFO convention. His next fare happens to be two normal-looking teenagers, Sara and Seth—but these are no ordinary teenagers. Instead, they claim to be alien visitors returning to Earth to collect scientific data that might just save their home planet and thereby prevent the impending invasion of Earth by their people.

Bruno, however, has seen and heard it all in his cab-driving life. He is not easily persuaded that Sara and Seth are extraterrestrials. Granted, they are able to say and do some relatively odd things—make his vehicle go incredibly fast, read his mind, levitate objects in midair. But he has a lifetime of skepticism to counter these odd phenomena. He attempts to accommodate these unusual experiences within his existing worldview for as long as possible.

In the end, however, the oddities multiply. Visiting an abandoned home, Bruno and the teens are ambushed by powerful alien hunters that Sara and Seth are able to paranormally repel. The life-saving research is found, and Jack watches the ‘teens’ motor off in their own spaceship to return to their home planet. Bruno is forced to admit what he had previously rejected out of hand: aliens exist, and they’re in his cab.

Jack Bruno’s experience in Race to Witch Mountain nicely illustrates two sides to worldview thought: (1) the impact worldview has in directing our interpretation of data and events and (2) the possibility of worldview eventually being overturned by strong enough evidence or experiences.

For more on the influence of worldview, and all things worldview, check out:

Tawa J. Anderson, W. Michael Clark, and David K. Naugle, An Introduction to Christian Worldview: Pursuing God's Perspective in a Pluralistic World. IVP Academic, October 2017. 384 pp. Purchase on Amazon