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Naturalism has been around for a very long time in some form or another. There has been a real resurgence of naturalism over the last 20 years. Naturalism is not just a theoretical endeavor but I t I s somethi ng that I mpacts our understanding of humanness.
Naturalism has been around for a very long time in some form or another. There has been a real resurgence of naturalism over the last 20 years. Naturalism is not just a theoretical endeavor but I t I s somethi ng that I mpacts our understanding of humanness.
Naturalism has been around for a very long time in some form or another. There has been a real resurgence of naturalism over the last 20 years. Naturalism is not just a theoretical endeavor but I t I s somethi ng that I mpacts our understanding of humanness.
all who trust in them. This is said specifically about people who had elevated the materials of the created order to the status of that which is divine. We become like that which we put our trust in. If we project a picture of what ultimate reality is and call that nature, it is obvious that it is to that nature that we must go to find betterment for our situation, ie. Salvation. The first ingredients of reality which come under fire as we limit our perspective to all things natural are the things that play such a forceful role in the realm of our personhood. Things like our intentions, which can hardly be reduced to materials, especially seeing that the object of their focus most frequently has yet to materialize. Human beings are intentional creatures, and this makes things like responsibility and accountability possible. If you start to lose your grasp of intentionality as a substantive part of reality, the inevitable consequence i s that we come to see ourselves more as being determined by external influences and less as ourselves determining the next step we take. For all our vocabulary and sentiment about the value of freedom, the worldview that naturalism ends up providing us with is the most un-free variant available. And so naturalism is not just a theoretical endeavor but i t i s somethi ng that i mpacts our understanding of humanness and provides irresolvable conflicts in how we perceive the life we have been given. History Though naturalism has been around for a very long time in some form or other, there has been a real resurgence of naturalism over the last 20 years. This resurgence has been fueled by the formulation of a variety of unguided mechanisms which are seen to provide a self-organizational capacity to nature above and beyond the mechanisms traditionally heralded in the framework of evolutionary theory. These mechanisms are clustered under the label emergence. Much of reality is seen to have a variety of emergent T H E I N T E R N A T I O N A L N E W S L E T T E R O F L A B R I F E L L O W S H I P February 2012 The New Naturalism LAbri INTERNATIONAL Henk Reitsema LETTER TO THE LABRI FAMILY page 5 The most basic form of naturalism is the position that holds that Nature is everything. One of the problems with even this most basic form is that the scope of the concept nature is not enlarged as it is applied to reality. Reality is instead reduced to fit into a preconceived notion of what nature is. Looking Inward (David Ho, 2011, www.davidho.com) Dear Friends, In this issue of the International News- letter we are keeping in step with the theme of the 2012 Rochester LAbri Conference: In the Beginning: Cel- ebrating and Defending the Doctrine of Creation in a Naturalistic Culture. The featured article is adapted from a lecture by Henk Reitsema, originally given at the Rochester LAbri Confer- ence in 2010 under the title, The Renewed Popularity of Naturalism. Those interested in the complete ver- sion can purchase the recording at www.soundword.com. The article begins with a brief history of naturalism to help us place the related terminology and unravel some philosophical jargon. After noting new elements in the current discussion around naturalistic perspectives, Henk explores how these elements are im- pacting the way we see our world and ourselves today. The remainder of the article argues for another perspec- tive: anti-reductionism. In the Family Letter Robb and Christa Ludwick give an update from Dutch LAbri, where they just celebrated the 40-year anniversary of their work in the Netherlands. Remember to check www.labri.org for a recent look at any and all of the LAbri branches worldwide. And as always, if you have any ques- tions, comments or tips for us concern- ing our website or this newsletter, please feel free to contact us at labri@labri.nl. Blessings, The LAbri Workers properties, which are then seen to explain all the most complex forms of life and intellect. The term naturalism is ambiguous at a variety of levels. First of all in terms of its use within different disciplines, secondly in terms of the moment in history when it was used and thirdly in terms of its scope.With reference to its use in different disciplines, the term naturalist is not only used in philosophy but is also used to describe a person involved with natural history, the scientific study of nature and the natural world (particularly in the fields of botany and zoology). All these attempts to better understand how the natural order functions would seem worthy endeavors and are not the focus of the present paper. Philosophical naturalism was first seen to some extent in the works of the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales. He was one of the first to give explanations of natural events without the use of supernatural causes. This is something very different though from asserting that the supernatural does not exist. Also the medieval thinkers who might be labeled as Christian naturalists, held the door open for direct divine intervention at the same time as they searched for natural explanations rather than invoking the miraculous. The tradition of natural law thinking has roots in this scholasticism of the 12 th century and early Renaissance. Jean Buridan (a. 1295-ca. 1358), the University of Paris cleric contrasted the philosophers search for appropriate natural causes with the common folks habit of attributing unusual astronomi cal phenomena to the supernatural. Enthusiasm for the naturalistic study of nature picked up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as more and more Chri sti ans turned thei r attenti on to discovering the natural laws that God employed in governing the world. Galileo Galilei (15641642), insisted that nature never violates the terms of the laws imposed upon her. Naturalism in this sense still leaves open many ways to see nature as a created order where God is present and somewhat visible in the sense that He sustains the laws and regularities of His created order. Methodological naturalism is a modern term that is related to the position of these early Renaissance thinkers. It limits the scope of the term to how one goes about explaining events in the arena of science, without making a metaphysical claim but often dominoes into anti-supernaturalism as it leaves no tools for affirming divine intervention. It was over the last 300 years that an anti-supernaturalist bias manifested itself more fully in the camp of what we are calling naturalism. During the Enlightenment, a number of philosophers including Francis Bacon and Voltaire argued a philosophical justification for removing an appeal to supernatural forces from the investigation of the natural world. This was a project that had clear ontological overtures and led to what might be called metaphysical naturalism. Physicalism The current usage of the term naturalism derives from debates in America in the first half of the 20 th century. The self-proclaimed naturalists from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. For them nature is the only reality that is, everything, and that is a metaphysical claim. The implication is that there is no such thing as supernatural. This was something that Francis Schaeffer flagged in his evaluation of post-enlightenment science, especially as the scientific method was applied to the Bible. The scientific method came to be used to investigate all reality, including the human spirit. This contemporary use of the term naturalism fed into the development of the schools of thought called materialism and physicalism. Materialism is the most limited of the three concepts as it simply asserts that everything that exists is matter. This leaves little space for the existence of spirit and other such immaterial entities. Physicalism allows for all of reality being produced by the physical, maybe including the spiritual and is therefore broader. It also makes more fully clear that things like electromagnetism and other forces which are not easily reduced to matter, are part of what is real. Though Physicalism is intended as a very general claim about the nature of the world, by far the most discussion of Physicalism is in the literature of the philosophy of mind. The reason is that in philosophy of mind we Naturalism is not just a theoretical endeavor, it has an impact on our understanding of humanness Lloyd Morgan put it in the title of a book Emergent Evolution in 1921. Thi s emergence thi nki ng crystal l i zed philosophically in the earlier half of the 20 th century through the input of the likes of the British philosopher C. D. Broad.
He defended a realistic epistemology in The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925) 4 arguing that emergent materialism is the most likely solution to the mind-body problem. Broads definition of emergence amounted to the following: Even though complex wholes were produced by thei r components, the characteri sti c behavior of complex wholes, could not, even in theory, be deduced from the most complete knowl edge of the behavi or of i ts components. 5 Emergentist theories are typically non- reductive in the sense that they retain realism about the mind (which really does have causal influence in the world). They are physicalist and therefore naturalist because they retain the causal closure thesis. They try to explain differences in behaviour of an entity wholly on the basis of differences in structure. Both life, and consciousness, are seen in Stuart Kauffmans 6 view as emergent phenomena. But the question remains whether the concept of emergence sufficiently explains rather than just describes the new layers of complex reality. As Anderson (1972) 7 argues, At each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear. [And] at each stage, enti rel y new l aws, concepts, and generalisations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry The emergence model leans on the self- organising capacity of matter and talks about phase transition as a fundamental law of increasing complexity, but the specific details of this phase transition when and how it occurs, what properties and behaviours emerge are conti ngent on speci f i c contextual factors and are probably unique to that particular context. 8 This last remark demonstrates that while emergence is wielded as a concept to explain a number of the features of reality that are not explained by other mechanisms, it lacks explanatory power because it is not useful for prediction. Reductionism Though the concept of emergence seemed to lack the explanatory power to broadly excite people in the first half of the 20 th century, it has come back with a vengeance at the end of the century and into the 21 st century. Recent developments in swarm dynamics, complexity theory and self- replication studies have provided stimulating 3 find the most plausible and compelling arguments that Physi cal i sm i s f al se. Physicalism in its most basic definition includes the conviction that every physical effect has a physical cause. Though this would seem in a primary sense to leave no space for spiritual causes (or mental ones for that matter) this does not mean that all physicalists reject all things spiritual. There are a variety of forms of non- reductive physicalism that would want to maintain a realist perspective about things like mental properties and even the spiritual. This includes Christian thinkers like Nancy Murphy 1 . The problem for these non-reductive physicalist attempts is that the requirement for causal closure at the physical level leaves no space for higher level causes, or what is called top down causation. This has spurned some very complicated attempts at trying to describe how the mental is produced by and connected to the physical. One of the most influential of such attempts over the last decade has been the Superveni ence relationship which was championed by Jaegwon Kim 2 . Supervenience physicalism distinguishes between the subvenient level (material) and the supervenent level (higher level complexity, mental and maybe spiritual). The main goal is to describe the relationship between the two levels in such a way that though the supervenient level is produced by the physical, it none the less allows for something like the human will to cause things in the world without having that will simply being determined by chemical reactions etc. This attempt, though, seems doomed to break down on the problem of causal over- determination. Said another way: If every physical effect is explained by a physical cause, there is no need for a mental or spiritual cause for anything. These mental causes then become superfluous or irrelevant. This was a reason for even Jaegwon Kim to reject supervenience physicalism for a more reductive variant. Emergence The academic trend in response to this has been to revert back to a more vague description of the way that mental properties, intellect and all things immaterial have come about. This more vague account of the way that all the complex structure, mental properties and even the spiritual come about, is caught in the concept of emergence. Emergence has become what may be one of the most popular terms in academia today. It is also notably popular even to describe some movements in the church. The term was first coined by George Lewes a contemporary of Darwin in his book Problems of Life and Mind (1875). 3 Henri Bergson subsequently wrote a popular book using the term, called: Creative Evolution in1907 and Conwy The emergence model lacks real explanatory power because it is not useful for prediction Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Georg Helbig, 1919) analogies for how more complex layers of reality might have come about. While as of yet emergence is more a descriptive tool than an explanatory one, as it has little or no predictive import, many have grabbed onto it with the hope of finally understanding the world from a naturalist perspective. The philosophy of emergence is already having a deep and thoroughgoing impact on our understanding of the world and ourselves. Our understanding of nature as a completely unguided closed system has blown to life an optimism about the unguided or non-intentional processes inside of ourselves. When you say that it is a fact that everything that needs to be explained can be explained by the scientific research of material cause and effect, then you have closed the door on ever being able to become aware of a non-materi al or supernatural cause even if it does exist. We can never assert that, in principle, an event resists naturalistic explanation. As Bagger 9 points out, a perfectly substantiated, anomalous event, rather than providing evidence for the supernatural, merely calls i nto questi on our understandi ng of particular natural laws. Rather than invoke the supernatural, we can always adjust our knowledge of the natural in extreme cases. The inherent tendency to reduce the mental and the spiritual in humans to deterministic processes, as well as making it impossible to perceive the supernatural even if it is there, makes even methodological naturalism (the most mild form) an uneasy bedfellow for those of us who relate to God. Rather than risk missing the most exciting parts of reality and even our own existence, I would argue for a mode of scientific research that seeks to di scover and understand the regularities and laws that guide all that is available to our senses/ perceptions. Doing this without denying an origin to these laws and regularities ahead of time (a-priori) would seem as open as any attitude in the true spirit of learning. One coul d cal l thi s methodol ogi cal neutralism, as some have suggested we should do. Anti-reductionism Though laws and regularities constitute most of what is scientifically discovered in just about every discipline, we spend much too little time asking ourselves where these laws Henk Reitsema is a worker in Dutch LAbri. After studying philosophy at Potchefstroom University (South Africa), Henk has received degrees in theology (M.Div. Covenant Seminary 95) and philosophy of science and technology (M.A. Vrije Universiteit 07). In LAbri his work has focused on ethics and issues of faith and science. He and his wife Riana have three daughters. come from. The Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, provi des a philosophical framework that sets out to give laws and regularities even in the most complex layers of reality a place, without insisting on reducing them to lower level constitutive properties. Dooyeweerd formulated an approach in the 1930s and 40s, whi ch he termed the Phi l osophy of the Idea of Law or the Cosmonomic idea. This approach attempts to catal ogue what he woul d cal l the encyclopaedia 10 of reality, by observing which modalities 11 are operative in reality. A modality being a layer or aspect of reality, which forms a kind of playing field for a specific realm of law guided behaviour. Each modality allows for the functioning of non-reducible laws in his perspective. Whi l e Dooyeweerd woul d affi rm the existence of non-reducible 12 laws in the various layers of reality, he sees a hierarchy in these modalities, where starting from the lowest modalities of numeric identifiabillity, spatial organization, kinematic (energy based) behaviour etc., the higher layers (biological, psychological, logical etc.) build on the lower ones using and riding on the law guided behaviour of the lower ones but adding new laws at each subsequent higher level, that cannot be found back in the lower. In this schematic the higher levels are seen to open up the lower levels and so limit and regulate the potential behaviour at the lower levels. There is therefore not only one-way traffic from the bottom up but also causal impact from the top down. The higher levels are not caused by the lower levels but also do not violate the laws of the lower levels. 13 They rather ride on them. This is an account of how reality works that does not get caught up in the web of causal over-determination as every materialistic or physicalistic attempt to account for things like mental properties, our will and the spiritual do. The difficulty with letting laws stand in their own right, for the physicalist (and most naturalists) is the immaterial nature of laws Naturalism does not dare to leave open the question about the origin of all the laws and constants it discovers 4 and relationships. This is one of the supreme paradoxes for a scientific community which spends so much of its time working with laws. Naturalism which dominates the scene in much of academia today, is so rigorously anti- supernatural that it does not dare to leave open the question about the origin of all the laws and constants it discovers. So it is frontloaded with a reductionist tendency (wanting to reduce all regularities to being products of the simplest parts) and in so doing risks becoming blind to much of the most exciting things in the universe, things like meaning and intent. When we open our eyes to the wonderful constellation of constants that govern the universe, the Creator proves to be more present than ever. 1 Murphy, N. 2010 Nonreductive Physicalism, (ed. A. Runehov, Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, Springer. forthcoming). 2 Supervenience and Mind, (1993) Cambridge University Press. 3 p. 412 4 Broad, C.D. (1925), The mind and its place in nature. London: Routledge and Paul Kegan. 5 Broad, C.D. (1999)[1925], Mechanism and Emergentism, in: Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa (ed.) Metaphysics an anthology, pp.487-498. p.493 6 Kauffman, S. A. (1992), Origins of Order: Self- Organisation and Selection in Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 7 Anderson, (1972) p. 395 8 Mason, (2000) p. 1&2 9 Bagger 1999, Religious experience, Justification and History p. 13 10 Dooyeweerd , H. (2002) [orig. 1967], Encyclope- dia of the Science of Law, Translated by Robert N. Knudsen. Edwin Mellen Press, New York, p. 11 11 Dooyeweerd, (2002) p.94 12 Irreducibillity is basically seen by Dooyeweerd as that which it is impossible to theoretically reduce. Something is irreducible when it can not be understood in terms of categories foreign to itself. Dooyeweerd, (2002) p. 236 13 Dooyeweerd, (2002) p.95 For up-to-date information on schedules and prayer points you can always visit the various branch sites at www.labri.org. But in each issue of the newsletter we highlight a few aspects of the international work. This time a letter from Robb and Christa Ludwick at Dutch LAbri.
Dear Praying Family, Greetings from the apple orchards of Eck en Wiel! We are happy to be able to share with you one of the highlights of this past year in Dutch LAbri:: the celebration of the 40 th anniversary of LAbri work in the Netherlands. To mark the occasion, we invited those who have supported us over the years to come out to LAbri again for a special day together. The trustees of LAbri were in town for their meetings, so we planned a schedule of coffee, lunch and seminars given by Wim Rietkerk, Dick Keyes, Jock MacGregor, Inkyung Sung and Andrew Fellows, and we sent out the invitations What an encouraging blessing it was when more than 150 people turned up for the day! We began the celebration in the village church of Eck en Wiel a lovely 15 th century building which, thanks to a good relationship with the staff, we get to use for various events. Wim and former LAbri worker Hans van Seventer recounted the story of how Dutch LAbri began and has grown. The many different tales of ups and downs, joys and griefs, mishaps and answers to prayer, were all a real testimony to the adventure of grace that this work has been. Nearly 10,000 people have come through Dutch LAbri since 1971. Reflecting on that together reminded us of how blessed we are to be used by God, and we are thankful He has done it! In the coffee break it was fun to hear the guests reminisching as well some people had not seen each other in 20 or 30 years! And everyone enjoyed seeing the pictures of the old days, a real reminder of the personal character of this work especially fun for us were the shots of Christa running around here in Eck en Wiel as a little girl! One guest remarked how the life of Dutch LAbri in many ways mirrors Christas: beginning in Eck en Wiel (Christa was born just months after Dutch LAbri opened its doors), moving through a time of growth and expansion in Utrecht, and coming back to a fruitful and abundant time in Eck en Wiel again. Special! As the celebration continued, Dick spoke on why LAbri communities have survived. Again it was clear: the only reason LAbri is or has ever been here or anywhere else is the love and care of God. Perhaps easy to say, but the truth is that we need divine help even to begin to comprehend this love. Learning to be constantly mindful of this gift is the heart of our work, and that does not come naturally. But as Dick said, quoting a well-known phrase of Dr. Schaeffer, it is a good prayer to live by, since we live moment by moment anyway! We were also really thankful that it was a beautifully sunny day a rarity for late November in Holland! As we all walked back to the LAbri property together, many remarked that it seemed God was smiling on our celebration. Lunch was next on the program: serving 150+ people a meal was no small task for our small team, but it was an important part of the day and was deepy appreciated. Full tables of delicious and healthy goods have always been part of the LAbri vision of hospitality, and today was no exception! We then divided up for different workshops led by the trustees: Dick and Wim on LAbris history and vision, Andrew on trusting the Bible as Gods Word, Inkyung on how LAbris unique community has been important in the east, and Jock on the risks of certain trends in western churches. As the day closed with tea, it was also great to notice the wide variety in the people present. There were guests from the 70s, 80s, 90s and even people who had just been to LAbri for the first time a few weeks before. There were those who had left the church and returned, those who were still seeking, and even some village locals who are not believers at all, simply interested in celebrating with us as neighbors. LAbri has been a real shelter in many contexts and many eras for many people, in the Netherlands and in every place a branch has opened. There was indeed a sense of God smiling on us that day, an encouragement to make looking back an important part of looking forward. As we continue on with welcoming guests, keeping up our property and finding new ways to translate Gods truth into our time and place, we know this: He is and remains faithful! Thanks for your prayers and have a blessed 2012! Greetings, Robb & Christa Ludwick To the Praying Family ...