Note:  Dr. Cuddeback is co-author of the CLAA's courses in Natural History & Natural Philosophy, opening in 2011.  For information on the course, click here.

When William Michael and I began to discuss how the CLAA might approach the study of philosophy, we learned that we share a common concern: how will today’s students be properly prepared to study the highest of natural (as opposed to revealed) sciences? This is a problem that is as difficult as it is pressing.  Much of the current CLAA curriculum is designed to begin to address this problem. Indeed, the seven liberal arts were always understood to be precisely those arts that best prepare the mind for the pursuit of wisdom, or philosophy. CLAA students will thus have a significant advantage when it comes to the study of philosophy.

But there is more to preparing for philosophy than the liberal arts. The study of philosophy also requires a certain baseline of life experience. A critical part of this life experience is experience of the natural world. It has been observed that one of the major causes of the inability of today’s students to understand the great western philosophical tradition is their lack of a substantial knowledge of the natural world. This should come as no surprise to Christians. We know that God has designed the natural world to have a critical pedagogical role in human life. We can say that the natural world provides many of the fundamental lessons the human knower must learn. The great St. Thomas Aquinas uses the following analogy to convey this point. In order to learn how to think and reason as God intends us to, men must observe the natural world, just as an apprentice must observe the works of his master in order to learn a craft.

This truth ought to be a matter of serious concern for today’s parents and teachers, and this for two main reasons. First, our common habits of living, especially those prevalent among youth, foster a distance from and ignorance of the natural world. At no time in history has a civilization lived in such separation from the natural world. Second, the regnant ‘natural science,’ one hammered into students in classrooms and enshrined in cultural practices, sees the natural world as mechanistic and the fruit of chance and accidental causes. Together, these two factors wreak havoc on how the vast majority of people think about man, God, and morality.

The solution to this situation is far from simple. Part of the solution will take the form of prudent attention to habits in the area of culture and technology. Salutary activities, such as gardening and hiking among others, should be encouraged. Activities that tend to distance us from healthy interaction with people and the natural world, such as video games and surfing the web, should be carefully limited or excluded. These issues are difficult and will require prudent deliberation and courageous action by parents and teachers.

Part of the solution is in the arena of academics. Many ‘science’ courses approach the natural world through the lens of a thoroughly mechanistic and evolutionary framework. As a result the natural world is not seen as the vibrant ordered whole that it is. In biology in particular an over-specialized emphasis on parts and processes rather than wholes and their activities, together with a deluge of technical jargon tend actually to dull both the student’s vision of the natural world and his sense of wonder and belonging in it.

It is with these points in mind that we have designed a two-part series in Natural History, commencing with Natural History I: The Animal Kingdom. The ultimate goal or end of this study is fundamentally twofold: moral formation and intellectual formation. This study contributes to the formation of moral character by cultivating a connaturality with the natural world: i.e., an experiential sense of belonging and communion (a kind of oneness through similarity) with the rest of what God has created.  Such a connaturality enhances our perception of the dignity and the challenge of being a creature of God. It gives a sense of direction and purpose. At the same time it encourages an attitude of stewardship, an attitude grounded in gratitude for our place in creation.

This study provides intellectual formation inasmuch as knowledge of the natural world, especially one that perceives order, hierarchy, and finality (purpose), prepares the mind for the higher philosophical sciences: both ‘speculative’ ones such as natural philosophy and metaphysics, and ‘practical’ ones such as ethics and politics. Seeing an order inscribed in nature is a foundation, for instance, for proofs for the existence of God, as well as for understanding the distinction between intrinsically good and evil ways of acting. More generally, this study prepares students for higher studies by training them to recognize and make distinctions, whether ones as fundamental as inanimate/animate and plant/animal, or as specific as oviparous/viviparous animals. We can also say that this study forms in students habits of intellectual and sensory attentiveness and receptivity to intelligible objects. One the most fundamental human attitudes toward truth should be that of humble attentiveness and receptivity.

We should note some important distinctions between our study of natural history and most ‘science’ today. In our study of the natural world we read the pre-specialist naturalists, among whom are Aristotle (384-322 BC), James Audubon (1785-1851), and Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915). While the more contemporary ‘specialist’ approach to the natural world has yielded an increase in factual information about many natural species and how they function, it has at the same time had unfortunate effects. There now tends to be something of a wall of separation between normal experience of the natural world on the one hand, and how people think about and study the natural world on the other. Most ‘scientific’ descriptions of natural species and their processes use a technical language that has at least two major drawbacks. First, it is laden with the theoretical framework of modern science, which is fundamentally flawed in some of its basic principles. Second, in its very technicality it tends to turn one’s attention more to the theoretical framework than to what our senses actually disclose about the world. The pre-specialist naturalists, by contrast, in reporting what their senses disclose tend to use language that is more generally accessible. In this way they draw our attention to the natural things themselves, enhancing our experience of the world through the five senses. They thus serve as our guides in turning a more attentive ‘eye’ to the natural world, thus building a strong foundation for a true science of nature.

 The study of natural history is not a cure-all for the problem of how most of us think, or do not think, about the natural world. But it is surely an important step in the right direction.

Go to CLAA Natural History Course Info page

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN CUDDEBACK, PH.D.

Growing up in the Patuxent Valley of Maryland, a paradise for birds, John Cuddeback followed in his father’s footsteps as an avid backyard bird-watcher and gardener. He spent many hours photographing and cataloguing the birds at his bedroom window feeder. Dr. Cuddeback later found that his love for and familiarity with animals and plants nourished his pursuit of higher studies in Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. He received both an M.A. and a PhD. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America. Since 1995 he has taught in the philosophy department at Christendom College, as chairman from 2004 to 2008. He writes and lectures on various topics including virtue, culture, natural law, contemplation, and friendship.  His book “Friendship: The Art of Happiness” was published in 2003, and republished in 2010 as “Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness.”  Dr. Cuddeback, a lay Dominican, is still an avid gardener and bird watcher, as well as a hunter and homesteading-farmer. He lives with his wife and five children in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.