132 Chapter 3 sin. Through God’s grace in His providential and saving work the unlocking process is in principle and fragmentary re-opened towards meaning and fulness of meaning. This means that development as such can go on, but does not always take place in the religious directionality towards God. (Troost, 2005, pp. 167–168) While the representatives of Reformational philosophy speak fully integratively and synthetically about reality, it is noteworthy that they carefully avoid the predicate holism or holistic. Dooyeweerd’s (1969) own work made it clear that what he perceived of holism mainly has to do with biology and is located at the other side of the antithesis, as he did with humanism. The philosophical conflict concerning the foundations of biology intervenes in the centre of scientific problems, and up to now, it is exclusively conducted within the cadre of a Humanist view of science. Can the Christian biologist choose sides in the sense of a mechanistic, a vitalistic or an holistic view of the living organism? Or will he consider it safer to hide behind the positivist mask of neutrality? For it is a naïve positivism that has caused the idea of philosophical neutrality to dominate the special sciences. Our conclusion is, however, that the positivistic conception of special science cannot be reconciled to a Christian cosmonomic Idea. (Dooyeweerd, 1969, p. 565) Troost (2005) showed how Reformational philosophy, in fact, subscribes to the critique of Western rationalism and reductionism and then pleaded throughout his work for clear, synthetic, theoretical thinking. Nevertheless, he warned that merely the correction of reductionism and rationalism will not provide a good alternative, ‘neither does the irrationalistic and personalistic chaos thinking that systematically (!) tries to be anti-systematic and anti-metaphysic’ (Troost, 2005, p. 216). What Troost (2005) opted for surpasses the holistic and humanistic alternatives he was aware of and is specifically Christian. Still, Troost (2005) recognised the need to relate himself and Reformational philosophy to the predicate holism: The moment of truth in holism is indeed that in all life there is a whole that is more than the connection or sum of the parts. It is therefore understandable that holism came up from biology, as a reaction against physical-mechanistic views that part exclusively from the parts of a whole (for example the physical qualified sub-structure), but cannot do justice to the typical own nature of many (organically qualified) wholes. The difference with the Reformational vision, however, is that also the biological or organic view, that within temporal reality surely has its right, cannot penetrate the real, if one like: the absolute, unity of all that belongs to created reality.
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