World of Difference Book

A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test by Kenneth Richard Samples is a scholarly work which seeks to show the way in which Historic Christianity is superior to the other truth-claims. The Christian's belief system and the Christian Theist worldview is being challenged and criticized for several different reasons. Kenneth Samples explains as a main idea in the book that it is due to a misunderstanding of the Christian worldview and a misunderstanding of truth and logic. Samples constructs the book in such a way the displays what logic is, explains the christian worldview in order to do away with misunderstanding and then evaluates the christian worldview next to other competing views of the world.
Summary
A World of Difference is split into three simple parts. Part one; Developing a Worldview Perspective, focuses on the nature of reality, truth, and logic concluding with a chapter on false ways of thinking and how to avoid them. These four short chapters are accentual and lay the foundation for the heart of the book. Without a proper understanding of truth and logic, the reader has no way of examining worldviews properly and evaluating them in order to develop a clear understanding. Part one explains what a worldview is (Chapter 1), how to test a worldview (Chapter 2), the nature of logic and reason (Chapter 3), and the nature of truth with a section on how to avoid Fallacious reasoning (Chapter 4).
Part two; Exploring the Christian Worldview, gives an over view of the Christian faith. This part of the book helps get rid of misunderstandings that people have about Christian Theism and answers the worldview questions in a simple and easy to understand way. Exploring the Christian Worldview, shows how Christians have a basis to understand truth (Chapter Five) and compares this to other competing ways of thinking.
He then goes through the three sections of the Apostles' Creed, explaining how this creed answers essential worldview questions in Chapter 6. Chapters seven through eleven deal with the historic Christian understanding of Scripture, God, creation, providence, man, and moral values. Chapter seven is titled God's Written Word - Scripture and deals with scripture being inspired, inerrant, and clear. Despite the chapter's title, it also deals with the two book theory and how God revels himself to us through nature. Chapter eight then explains a true understanding of the trinity and God's attributes . Chapter nine explains the biblical understanding of how God created the world out of nothing (Ex Nihilo) and its implications. The main implication of God being the creator is said to be God's ability to control his creation and how he ordains the events of history.
Chapters ten and eleven are very connected and deal with the Christian view of man (chapter 10) and Moral Values (Chapter 11). Kenneth Samples explains that, according to scripture, man is created in the image of God (the Imago Dei) but we, because of the fall, are sinful and in need of a savior which brings us right into chapter eleven dealing with moral values. Kenneth Samples explains how Christians have a foundation for human ethics. Because of the laws of logic, ethics must be absolute and not subjective because something cannot be right and wrong at the same time.
The last part of A World of Difference is titled Evaluating Worldview Competitors. This final section of the book goes through and evaluates Naturalism, Postmodernism, Pantheistic Monism, Islam and finally Christian Theism. These chapters start out by explaining the core beliefs of the worldview being examined and then seeks to address some worldview questions. This first part of these chapter simply make sure that a proper understanding of the worldview is being examined so that we are not setting up and attacking a straw man when we are evaluating a worldview (p.66). The last part of the chapters in Evaluating Worldview Competitors, goes through and explains the positive and negative elements of the worldview using the worldview test from chapter two. The final chapter of the book does pouts the Christian truth-claims from part two through the worldview test from Part one of the book.
Critical Evaluation
The thesis of the book is that Christianity is superior to other truth-claims and Kenneth Richard Samples did an amazing job defending his thesis by the way he laid out the book, the clear foundation he laid in part one, and finally by portraying his solid understanding of other worldviews, truth, and reason. The book has a handful of problems but is overall helpful and well written. All three sections of the book are clear and build on each other in order to give a clear defense of Christianity. As you have seen from the summary, A World of Difference is laid out in such a creative way that it all comes together in chapter sixteen Testing the Christian Theistic Worldview. Kenneth Samples' clarity and great ability to explain logic and reason, make the book so much more enjoyable and helpful. The way he explains all the aspects of logic and ways of thinking are explained, examples are given, and on the more difficult ideas, tables or diagrams are used to clearly portray the main idea. Kenneth Samples also made the book more helpful by adding a short paragraph about his experience when he was in a life-and-death crisis because of a sickness. People can relate to these experiences even if they are not Christians because the thought of dying is real for everyone. These short sections help to display the impact of worldview thinking and reminds the reader of some reasons why worldview need to be examines and tested.
Even though this book was wonderful and very helpful for me as a christian, it still had a few problems. I discovered the first problem that I had with the book when I was reading about the laws of logic (39-54) and false ways of thinking (55-72) after reading about the worldview test (31-38). The entire book is laid out so that the information builds on the previous chapter so that the last section can be understood and the most amount of information can be absorbed but the placement of the overview of the laws of logic was badly misplaced. The basis for the worldview test is logic and proper thinking. You cannot learn to examine a worldviews truth-claims without a proper understanding of truth and logic.
The other negative aspect of A World of Difference is the way Kenneth Richard Samples approached the negative and positive elements of the worldviews in part three. When discussing the positive elements of the worldviews, Kenneth Samples explains the positive elements of the worldview for the first half of the section but then trails off into how those things are ether positive because they match the Christian worldview or explains how those positive elements are not purely legitimate The section on the positive elements of the non-Christian worldviews should only contain the positive aspects of the worldview and the negative elements should be saved for the section on the negative elements.
The responses for the criticisms of Christian Theism were very helpful and truthful except for his defense of the doctrine of the trinity being logically sound (267). Kenneth Samples tries to explain how the doctrine of the Trinity is not incoherent by saying that "Logically speaking, the Trinity avoids incoherence, for God is one in a different respect from the way he is three, and three in a different respect from the way he is one". When dealing with the problem of evil (268-269), Kenneth Samples says that it is a "deep mystery", but when talking about the trinity he does not seem to portray that. I respect his great effort to try to make the Doctrine of the Trinity fit the laws of logic, but I would like to say that we cannot explain and understand the nature of God, especially the trinity, completely (Job 36:26, Job 33:12, Isaiah 55:8-9).