Nature Studies

The study of nature must be integrated into a comprehensive vision of reality as God’s creation. Otherwise, the human person who is at the foundation of the curriculum becomes unintelligible and the truth about him becomes a matter of private opinion.

The study of nature, therefore, begins from the presupposition that all of reality is God’s creation, though the implications of this are easily misunderstood. The act of creation is not an alternative to natural processes; nor is the doctrine of creation an alternative to natural explanations. The act of creation is not something done to the world since prior to creation there is nothing to act upon. The doctrine of creation, therefore, does not explain how the world came to be, but what the world is. And to treat nature as creation is not to confuse science with theology or to divert attention from nature to prove God’s existence, but to behold nature differently in a way that is at once deeper and more comprehensive, but no less rigorous, than modern scientific materialism.

• It is to recognize that we do not arbitrarily impose meaning upon a meaningless material world, but that meaning is inherent in the world itself. It is reflected in a rational order that penetrates to the depths of the natural order and can be apprehended by reason.
• It is to see the infinite generosity of God reflected in the mysterious uniqueness of every living thing.  
• It is to recognize that this mysterious uniqueness can never be exhaustively explained or understood and can only be fully appreciated through the eyes of love.
• It is to recognize that what things are is not exhausted by how they work or how they came to be. Therefore, living things are wholes, irreducible to the interaction of their parts or the history of causes that produced them. They are wholes that transcend their parts. o It is to recognize that living things differ essentially from non-living machines because:
  • Unlike a machine that acquires its identity only at the end of a manufacturing process, living things have a nature, and therefore a unity, that precedes and guides their development. (This is partly what is meant by soul. It is also why a fetus is a person from the moment of conception and why it eventually matures into an adult: because it is already human.) 
  • Unlike a machine, an organism is not a means to an end and its purpose is not imposed from the outside. An organism’s end or ‘good’ is internal to it and is that for the sake of which it develops and acts. Maturity and health are the ends for which organisms ordinarily develop and grow as they do. 
  • Machines and other inanimate objects have an environment which surrounds them but is basically eternal to them. Living things have a world which they assimilate to themselves through metabolism and within which they move themselves and act. This world is not just the organism’s physical surroundings, but the whole order, including past, future, and other creatures, which makes up the organism’s ‘action space’. - Higher organisms are characterized by having a larger world in this comprehensive sense. Man has the largest world of all, since he can deliberate about his future, since his world includes God, and since he can respond to God’s call.
  • There is, therefore, an essential difference between the living and the non- living, between procreation and mechanical reproduction, between what is born and what is made. No aspect of the human body or of human biology is ever merely material or purely biological, but personal. All human biology is personal biology, the biology of persons.
• It is to recognize that science alone, which is preoccupied with the causal history and mechanical aspects of the natural world, is not sufficient to understand what nature, living things, and human persons are. Philosophy and ultimately theology are also required.