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As Psalm 115:8 so cogently puts it: Those

who make idols will be like them, and so will


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 ...

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