This talk is intended for parents and students of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy who are trying to understand how Catholic students should think about the study of the natural sciences, with a Catholic mindset, with a coherent system of Catholic thought. Many think that there’s a choice to be made between Classical Studies and Modern studies. But as I’d like to explain in this talk, that’s not the case. In fact, I would argue that in order to be true scientists, to be good scientists, we actually need to understand scholastic philosophy first and then study science within the context of scholastic philosophy. That’s what makes for real Catholic science. And I’d like to talk about why that is, and explain what a proper approach to the study of science would look like, and how that can be done in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
It’s easy to see, if we look around without even thinking much at all, we can see just how incredibly quickly technology is developing. This has been called the Information Age. We now see the development of artificial intelligence, and we really have no idea what sort of tools are going to be developing in coming years. We see that the collection of data is just incredible. We can track so many things, collect information, visual information, audio information. All of this data can be recorded and processed and added to databases and analyzed on and on, just incredible, incredible tools for the collection of data.
But if we study the scientific method, it’s very clear that the goal of scientific observation, the goal of experiments, is not to collect data. The goal is not to just have lots and lots of information. The real goal is to analyze, to interpret that data and draw conclusions. And even that is not the end goal of scientific study. The real goal is to predict the future, predict what will happen, predict how things can be controlled or changed or prevented. And so there’s all of this work that’s needed, and the real work of the scientist is to reason with the data that’s available in a way that’s insightful, in a way that is able to recognize patterns or draw sound conclusions, reasonable conclusions that produce useful information, actionable information, things that we can actually use to improve the quality of life, to prevent avoidable evils and to promote the common good.
So the ability to collect data, the ability to just store and retrieve endless amounts of data, that’s really not the goal of science, and so it’s always going to come back to the need for someone who’s able to make sense of all this data, to draw conclusions from this data, and those skills are not developed in modern education. So that’s both a problem that needs to be addressed and one that leads us to see the value of classical education.
Modern education treats science as a collection of information that has been collected and organized by other people. When we study a course like chemistry, we’re taught all sorts of facts and told things, and as I tell my own children and students, the way to do well in a modern chemistry class is just to listen to what the teacher says, read what the textbook says, and repeat it when you’re called upon. Very rarely is any of the information explained. Very rarely are any of the assertions demonstrated by means of experimentation. It’s almost like a religion. When you take the class, it’s like studying the Catechism as a Catholic child, you’re taught lots of information, and you’re tested on your ability to repeat that information that you’ve been taught.
The same is true in biology. You’re taught the names of things. You’re led to describe things. You maybe dissect an animal and learn the names of all of its parts. But it’s just, it’s just the retrieval of information. That’s not real science. And the same is true with physics. You’re taught facts about the natural world, you’re taught formulas, and then you’re simply asked to plug different numbers into the formulas and calculate the answers. But that’s not real physics. And so all of this modern science may be interesting compared to some other classes, but it’s not real science. It’s actually ignoring the real work of science, which is to solve problems. The scientific method is a method of solving problems in the natural world, and we’re not doing that in most modern science classes.
As I mentioned before, this lazy, shallow, simple information gathering and retrieval of information is not real science, but more importantly, as computers and artificial intelligence develop, the machines are going to be much better at that kind of work than human beings are, and so human beings are going to have all of that taken away from them by the machines, and they’re going to be left either with no work to do, or they’re going to do work that the machines can’t do, more advanced, truly human reasoning, thinking, analyzing and so on. So if we want to be real scientists, if we want to be good scientists, I would argue that we need classical education, not as an alternative to a scientific education, but as a preparation and guide for a scientific education.
Now, if we’re to ask, what really is the value of a classical education when it comes to scientific problems, problems in the material world, how does ancient learning really help us? And it has to do with the concept of wisdom itself. If we were to ask, what is wisdom, Aristotle explained in his philosophy, 2300 years ago, that when we say that we know something as human beings, when human beings say that they know a thing, what we mean is that we understand the causes of things. The knowledge of causes is what makes us feel that we know something, and we understand that one of the things that drives us when we’re young and learning is just the desire to know why, why things are the way they are. Why does a rainbow appear in the sky? Why does the sky appear to be blue? Why do the tides rise and fall when we visit the beach and swim in the ocean? Why do these things happen? Why do we get sick sometimes? Why do these things happen? We ask the question why. We want to understand not the names of things, not the names of parts of things. We really want to understand why things happen, especially when bad things happen. We want to know why someone gets sick. We want to know why something’s not working. We want to understand the causes. That’s the real knowledge that we seek. We seek the knowledge of causes of things, and God has equipped us, in a very special way with the ability to study and search out and discover the causes of things. That’s really what knowledge, scientific knowledge is after. We want to understand the causes of things.
Now Aristotle did the work of explaining that anytime we’re thinking about anything, there are four different causes. So when we ask the question, Why, or we think about what the causes might be, there are four different kinds of causes. And these things are not taught in modern science classes. There are four different kinds of causes. The first cause is called the material cause, the material cause. The second cause is called the formal cause, the formal cause. The third kind of cause is called the efficient cause, and the last is called the final cause. We have these four different kinds of causes, material cause, formal cause, efficient cause and final cause. And in order to be able to ask a question, solve a problem, conduct an experiment, collect data, interpret data, draw conclusions from data, we need guidance. There has to be something that we seek. We have to have clear objectives in this work that we do, and going into scientific work, going into experimentation, making use of the scientific method, really only can be successful if we have the benefit of the guidance of an understanding of these four causes.
And just to provide a quick overview of them. This is not the time to learn these things. We can study this in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, if we want to really get into it. But the material cause looks at what the actual cause of a thing is with respect to the matter of it, what is it actually made of? So if we were to think about a statue, for example, Aristotle loves to use the example of a statue. We might look at a statue and say, what’s it made of? It’s made of marble or it’s made of bronze. That’s the material cause of the thing, the matter of which it consists. So understanding the matter is an important cause that needs to be understood and studied by means of scientific observation.
The second kind of cause, the formal cause, is understanding the essence of a thing. What is it? What is this thing? What is the substance of this thing? So again, if we were looking at the statue of a man, we would be able to recognize the form of a man or the essence of a man in the statue, we would be able to look and see essential qualities of a man joined with the material cause, joined with the matter of the marble or the bronze, and we would see that this statue is a statue that represents a man.
Third we have the efficient cause, which identifies the agent. What was it, or who was it that caused this thing to be? Who was the agent, who was the maker of this thing? That’s the efficient cause. And then fourthly, the final cause, is the cause for which the thing was made. What is the end for which this thing was made? When we study something and we examine the four causes, we gain a real scientific knowledge of that thing, a full and complete understanding of it.
So the purpose of scientific study is not just to gather random information, not to collect any information, because much of the information that would be collected is irrelevant. For example, we could measure the temperature of the statue and say, this marble in the statue. The marble is 74 degrees Fahrenheit. We could collect that data and measure the temperature, but what would the use of that be? That’s really irrelevant. And if we came back an hour later or a day later, the temperature might be different. And it’s really irrelevant, that quality can come and go. That’s not an essential quality of the thing. So you can see how approaching the study of any object in the material world requires the guidance of sound philosophy. And a good example of this sound philosophy is a knowledge of the four causes.
So that’s an example of how going into scientific study with a foundation already established of scholastic philosophy would help a scientist to actually know what information was to be sought, what information is actually useful, how to actually analyze and make use of data that’s collected and so on. If we look at modern science, we find that this is not done. And the most important cause of all, the one that is neglected in modern science, is the final cause. Finality. It’s very rare for people to ask, why does this thing exist? And yet, that’s the most important question of all, why does this thing exist?
For example, let’s say you go out into your backyard on a summer night and it’s nice and cool in the evening, the sun goes down, and you’d like to sit out on the back porch, and all of a sudden you realize that you start to get bit by mosquitoes. Well, as you’re sitting there being annoyed by these mosquitoes, you might think, How can I get rid of these mosquitoes? And you might say, well, I’m going to buy some mosquito spray and spray it all over the place, and I’m going to kill all the mosquitoes. And that sounds like a scientific thing to do. You can figure out what chemical would kill mosquitoes, and you can act like a scientist and spray it all over the place and celebrate the fact that you will no longer get bit by mosquitoes when you go sit out on the deck in the middle of the night in summer, but you’re ignoring an important question, and the question that a wise man would ask before he went and killed all the mosquitoes, he would ask, what is the purpose of these mosquitoes? Why do these mosquitoes exist? And he would study to understand the purpose or the end of the mosquitoes, and he would make sure that there wasn’t some necessary or important purpose or function served by mosquitoes that killing them would lead to trouble with. So we see that often in modern science, there’s little consideration for the final cause of things, why things exist.
I’ll give you another good example, good example of a problem that scientists, I don’t believe have been able to solve, with respect to final cause. When my wife and I were first married one night, she had terrible pains in her abdomen, so bad that she was crying, and she asked me to take her to the hospital. And we got to the hospital, and the doctor examined her and told us that she was having a problem with her appendix and the appendix needed to be removed. Well, you can imagine being told that a part of your body needs to be removed causes some concern. What’s going to be the effect of taking this part out of my body? And when we talk about the appendix, we learn that modern scientists, modern physicians, don’t really know what the purpose of the appendix is, and they conclude that it really has no purpose, and so they say it can cause pain, it can cause trouble, but it’s really not important, so it’s no big deal if we take it out. Well, that may appear to be true, but it may not actually be true, and we have to ask the question, why would the appendix exist if it really had no purpose? And so we can see the fact that an appendix can cause great pain and even risk someone’s life, and yet seem to have no positive purpose or reason to exist. We see that we face a problem with respect to the final cause, or what is the purpose of the appendix?
So you can see how the knowledge of these causes directs our scientific questions and investigations and experiments, and often in modern science, the question about causes is ignored. One of the reasons why final cause is ignored is because it can offend people. People can be upset by different ideas about things. For example, if we were to talk about a woman’s body and say, well, all women are born with a uterus, and if we were to say, Well, why would all women be born with a uterus? And we could say, well, the function of a uterus is to produce a child. And we can conclude, oh, well, it seems that nature intends for women to produce children. And you can imagine that some women who don’t want children would find that pretty upsetting to be stuck with this question of why they would have a uterus if they were not intended to have children. So you can see some of these questions about cause and finality. They can be pretty upsetting to people, and sometimes when we’ve got a society filled with people with different religious views, different explanations for the origins of things, these questions of finality or the ends for which things exist, they can get pretty controversial and make people upset. And so when we’ve got diverse communities of people, lots of people would like to just not talk about final causes. And yet, the truth of things and the benefit of scientific study is often entirely linked to the final cause of things, understanding what the purpose of things really is.
So we see these four causes coming from Aristotle’s philosophy, and they direct us in our scientific study in modern society, and most modern students don’t know about these things and don’t have the benefit of the guidance of the knowledge of these four causes. So that’s one thing. The second consideration, the second cause that I mentioned, formal cause, is often very difficult, because the formal cause is just to put this very simply again, if you want to study this in detail, you’ll need to study Aristotle’s philosophy. But the formal cause asks, What is this thing? It asks for the essence of a thing. And it’s actually very difficult to identify the essence of a thing. It’s very difficult to define things. And I’ll give you an example. If I were to ask you to define a squirrel, you might immediately think of a squirrel. You might have an image in your mind of a squirrel. But if I were to ask you for the definition of a squirrel, and I were to say to you, the definition to be a true definition would only be true of a squirrel. If it’s true of anything else, then it can’t be the definition of a squirrel. That would make things much more difficult. And it’s very difficult to define things. So how would you define a squirrel? This is identifying the formal cause, what is the essence of this thing?
So if we were to look at a squirrel and I say, what is it? Define what this thing is, you could say, well, a squirrel is a gray furry animal that lives in trees. And we might think and say, I can think of another gray furry animal that lives in trees, a raccoon. A raccoon is a gray furry animal that lives in trees. So that can’t be the definition of a squirrel. What is a squirrel? Boy, that’s more complicated. A squirrel is a gray furry animal that lives in trees and eats nuts. How about that? Well, as far as I know, raccoons don’t eat nuts. I may be wrong, but I’m not sure that that’s the definition, because I heard that there are also black squirrels, and so we would realize that, well, gray can’t be a part of the definition, because there are also black squirrels. So we have to drop that. We say, Okay, well, a squirrel is a furry animal that lives in trees and eats nuts. And now the definition gets even less clear. So you can see that as we wrestle through this, we find that it’s actually very difficult to identify the essence or form of a thing, to give it an accurate and true definition of what a thing is and really, we can’t do that without the help of philosophy, we have to know philosophy to be able to identify the formal causes of things. And we learn about this subject. We learn about this in Aristotle’s Organon, which is his system of logic.
So the point of this is that these four causes really provide us with an understanding of something that allows us to know that we know what a thing is, because we know the causes of it. We know these four causes of a thing, but the knowledge of these causes is difficult to come to and so we need to understand the four causes very clearly before we can even begin to pursue any kind of useful scientific knowledge of the natural world. So without the help of philosophy, we really can’t be good scientists. What will end up happening if we try to study science without philosophy is we’ll just observe all the same stuff that everyone else can observe. We’ll see the same things, hear the same things, measure the same things, have access to the same data that everyone else has, and there will just be a crowd of scientists standing around all the same stuff, with no ability to draw any insightful conclusions about what any of the data actually means. So the world needs not more scientists, but wise scientists, to actually bring a philosophical mind with wisdom into scientific experimentation.
One of the most important philosophical studies that is needed for work in scientific investigation is a knowledge of the art of logic or reasoning. The reason why the art of logic is so important is because logic allows us to draw conclusions that are absolutely certain. If we don’t understand logic, we’ll often draw conclusions that may appear to be necessary and true, but which a logician or one who is a master of logic would be able to demonstrate are not actually true. And so when we have lots of data, lots of information, lots of observations, and we start asking the question, so what? What does this data tell us? What does this mean? It’s going to take real skill in logic to look at the information that’s been collected, go over the data and be able to draw from it valuable conclusions. And this is, again, going to rely on a knowledge of philosophy to do this.
Now, one of the reasons why logic, classical Aristotelian logic, is so important, is because there are two different kinds of reasoning. One kind of reasoning is called deductive reasoning, and that’s where we start with universal statements, knowledge of whole classes of things, and we use universal statements knowledge that’s true of an entire class of things to draw conclusions about individual members of a class. And you can see how important that will be if we’re trying to solve problems and even predict the causes or future events in the natural world. So deductive logic moves from knowledge of classes of things and applies that by reason to individual members of those classes. And you can see how valuable that is, because anything that’s true of an entire class is also going to be true of an individual member of that class.
And I’ll give you an example, if we know that all men are mortal, and some people even believe that mortal should be a part of the definition of man. So if we ask what is a man? Some would say a man is a rational animal. That’s what a man is. That’s the formal cause of man. He’s a rational animal. Some would add to that mortal. He is a mortal rational animal. He’s a rational animal that will die. Now, if we think about the work of a physician, and we’ve got someone who is sick or injured, and we bring that person to the physician, and we start to talk about how we can help this sick or injured person, knowing that this person is mortal is actually an important bit of knowledge, because if a person is 12 years old and requires certain treatment or a certain surgery, maybe certain medical prescription that may be expensive, costly. May take a long time to lead someone to recovery. If the person who’s injured is 12 years old or 25 years old or 40 years old, it may be worth the cost and effort and time to try and recover from this problem. But if the person is 89 years old, knowing that the person is mortal, knowing that there’s no chance that the person is going to live forever in this body, we come to questions about whether the treatment is worth it, because of the timing, whether the person is too old to try and recover from this or that problem, or try to fix this or that or have this surgery. So the knowledge that a person is mortal and that the average lifespan is 80 years old affects decisions that are made by a physician. So we can see how the knowledge of the essence of a thing, the knowledge of a class of things, leads us to draw conclusions and make judgments about what ought to be done with individuals that belong to that class. So that’s deductive reasoning, reasoning from knowledge about a class of things down to an individual member of that class.
Science, however, normally works with a different kind of reasoning, which is called inductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning, we look at individuals, and we try to look at as many individuals as we can. So for example, let’s say we study the body of a man, and we ask the question, well, what is man? And we say, well, I noticed that all men have two legs, two feet. So maybe the quality, having two feet should be included in the definition or the essence of a man. However, I met one man who only had one leg, and I met another man who had no legs. Are these still men? If these are still men, then two legs can’t be part of the definition of a man. So we can use inductive reasoning to study individuals and collect information about individuals, and then use that knowledge of individuals to try to draw conclusions about the whole class. We can study individuals and use data that we collect as we study individuals to try and draw conclusions about whole classes of things. That’s inductive reasoning. We work from individuals up to classes. Deductive reasoning, we work from classes down to individuals.
Now, one of the benefits of inductive reasoning is that we can see things. We can actually observe things. So we can be quite certain that what we know of an individual is true because we can perceive it with the senses. We can measure it. The weakness of inductive reasoning is that we can never, almost never, observe or study all of the individual members of a class. So it’s very difficult to make a statement about a whole class by inductive reasoning when we don’t get to see all the members of the class. And I’ll give you an example based on what I already said. Imagine if a man was studying individual men. And he was studying hundreds and hundreds of men and taking notes on all the qualities of the men that he observed. And he noticed that after studying 10,000 men, all of them had two legs, he would be tempted to conclude that all men have two legs, and he might be convinced that that was true, and say, You know what? I don’t need to see any more. I feel pretty confident to say that man is a two footed animal, and he would turn off the lights in his laboratory, lock the door and go home, happy that he, through his observations, came to this conclusion and was able to make this assertion about man, that man is a two footed animal. But let’s say there were 100 other men standing in line outside of the lab waiting to be examined.
He didn’t get to and let’s say one of those men had only one leg. That man, the scientist, would have drawn a conclusion based on all of the samples that he looked at, and his conclusion would be false if just one more man was to be examined who didn’t have two legs or who might have three legs. So we see that in inductive reasoning, we can never really be sure that what we assert about a class is absolutely true, because we’re making a judgment based on the observation of individuals, and we haven’t seen all of the individuals.
Another example of this is found in political science. We’ll see all the time that different news agencies or politicians will take polls, and what a poll will do is try to guess what people are thinking, what people are going to vote for, by asking questions of a number of people. So it’s an inductive study, inductive reasoning. So someone will go out into the town, for example, and they’ll start randomly asking people certain questions. And they may take people at random, or there may be a certain kind of person that they’re looking for, and they’ll ask the questions and collect the answers as data, and then they’ll try to draw conclusions about the whole group and what the election results are going to be, trying to predict the future based on their observation of individuals.
And so they may go out into the town, and let’s say there’s 80,000 people who live and vote in a certain town, they may ask 500 people, chosen at random what their thoughts are on a certain topic, and they might find that 490 people think this way on this topic, and 10 people thought the other way, and they may say, Well, we examined 500 people, and almost all of them said that they were going to do this. So we can conclude that in the election next month, the result is likely going to be this. We can see that that’s reasonable, if we’re going to take a guess about the election results. That’s reasonable, but it’s not certain, because we only asked 500 people, and there are 80,000 people in the town.
Now, if we were to ask 1000 people and find the same results, we would be more confident if we were to ask 10,000 people and find the same results, we would be more confident, but we would never be absolutely certain, because unless we’re able to examine every individual member of a class, we can never be absolutely certain that a universal statement about that class is true, so inductive reasoning is useful, but it’s not the same as deductive reasoning in philosophy. So understanding deductive and inductive reasoning, being able to reason accurately, being able to draw good conclusions. That’s all the work of logic.
And so we can see that to be good scientists, to be accurate scientists, to make good, insightful and true conclusions based on evidence and data collected, we need to understand the art of reasoning. And again, that’s studied not in modern schools, but that’s studied in classical education.
If you study the modern sciences in a modern school, you’ll notice that your classes, the different subjects you study, will feel like they’re all disconnected and separate. You’ll go to a physics class, and you’ll learn about physics. It’ll be taught by physics teachers in physics classrooms, from physics textbooks. You’ll learn about physics in your physics class. But then another year or another semester, you’ll go and study chemistry, and you’ll notice that chemistry is treated like a different world. It’s taught by different teachers from different textbooks, in different classrooms, everything looks and feels different between a physics class and a chemistry class, and the same is true for biology.
You’ll also notice that if you take a math class, an algebra class or a calculus class. Again, it’ll feel separated. It won’t be anything like a chemistry class or a biology class or a physics class, and if you take an English composition class again, it’ll feel disconnected and different, a different department, a different building, different teachers, different books. In modern education, you can feel that all of the different subjects of learning are disconnected. It’s like information is being collected and taught in all these different areas, but none of it really comes together. None of it really goes together. It’s like the glue that binds it all together has been lost and we’ve just got a bunch of disconnected parts. That’s the result of trying to pursue scientific knowledge without a philosophical foundation.
First, one of the great benefits that Classical Studies and the study of philosophy and theology give to a student is that as he goes through his education, he will be able to bring all of these subjects together and benefit from all of them by joining them with philosophical and theological studies that give him insight and allow him to make connections between all of these different subject areas.
I’ll give you an example when I was younger, I taught a class on debate and disputation in a high school, and what the students had to do in this class was they had to find a problem or a controversial question, and they had to take time to research it, learn about it, study and they had to prepare what’s called a response to a disputation question. A disputation question asks a simple yes or no question, and the student has to choose which side he’s going to take for his answer, and he’s got to persuade the class that the answer that he chooses is the correct answer, and the student is given the opportunity to prepare his response. And then there’s a day scheduled where he delivers his response to the class, and when he’s done with his response, when he’s done presenting his response to the class, the class then has the opportunity to object, to object to specific things that he says, to point out problems in his argument and try to prove that he’s wrong and that the other answer is the correct answer, and the student who prepares the response has to refute all objections to his response to his answer.
Now, what was interesting about the disputations we had is that students would often choose a subject or a topic that was something they were comfortable with, something they like or are interested in. Kids who played sports would choose controversial subjects in sports, like whether professional athletes should be allowed to use steroids. So they would think that, because they’re studying a subject that they’re familiar with, it’ll be easy for them. And they would study different subjects like that, choose different topics like that, and they would be confident that because they knew this topic, they knew more about baseball or more about sports than their classmates, they would come to their class with their response and think that it was going to be easy.
However, as they started to make statements, as they started to make assertions in their responses, different kids would object. If the student presenting the response made a statement about the effects of steroids on the body, a student who’s very good in science or chemistry, might raise his hand and object and say, That’s not true. The chemistry of what you said is not accurate. And he would object to this statement with knowledge of the science of chemistry, Another student might object to some number or figure or calculation that a student presented, a student who is great in mathematics, would say, I object to that statement because your calculation is wrong.
And the student would find that as he tried to argue on a subject that he was comfortable with the knowledge of all of the other sciences and all of the other subjects in school, all had to be dealt with. And so in order to get the right answer, you had to not only know the subject in a general way, but you had to be able to know whether every assertion that you made about that subject was accurate, and the only way that you could do that was by having an accurate knowledge of all of the different subjects and sciences. You had to know history, you had to know theology, you had to know biology and chemistry and physics and mathematics. You had to know all of the sciences.
Because if you made any assertions which were known to be false by others who study those subjects, you were going to be in trouble, and you were going to not be able to defend your response against objections, and would fail the assignment. So the benefit of those disputations was that students quickly realized that if you want to be persuasive, if you want to be right in answering controversial questions, you have to know every subject, and so that class, those disputation exercises not only made students more effective in reasoning and argument, but it made them respect and appreciate all of their studies and understand the value of all of the different subjects that they had to study, because you never really know what subject or what science is going to be important when you have to solve a controversial, complex problem.
So we can see that philosophy and theology as well, they provide the glue that joins all of the different subjects, all of the different sciences together, and without that glue, without that foundation of philosophy, we just have a bunch of disconnected subjects that most kids don’t like. Kids will say, Oh, I don’t like math, I don’t like science, I don’t like history. That’s boring. I don’t like I’m not a good writer, and they’ll simply dismiss subjects that they’re not interested in, because they don’t have a philosophical foundation that helps them to understand and appreciate the importance of all of the different subjects.
So by establishing a foundation through classical studies of philosophy and theology, students will be able to appreciate the value of all of the different subjects and sciences and the value of the different sciences, the purpose of the different sciences will be understood by students who understand the higher sciences, philosophy and theology. Classical education, real classical education that leads students through the classical liberal arts into classical philosophy, into scholastic theology, provides that foundation which allows students to really be able to make use of all of the different arts and sciences that make up a great education and motivate them to continue studying throughout their lives and pursue knowledge of many different subjects and sciences as they mature outside of their primary areas of interest.
So that’s the value of the knowledge of these studies, philosophy, theology, the classical liberal arts, logic, for example, that are ignored and neglected in modern education, which creates this disconnected, pointless feeling when we go through education in modern schools.
So this all leads us to the question of what education should look like, and this is a topic question that I think many parents and students struggle with in the 21st Century in the classical liberal arts academy, I think that we present an answer to this question. I think that we show what education ought to look like, particularly for Catholic students in the 21st Century.
We make it very clear that you should not think about choosing one or the other, you should not choose a classical education or a modern education. Rather, you should understand that a classical education is the foundation and modern education is valuable when that foundation has been established. Modern education requires that you specialize in certain fields or studies. You can’t even figure out which fields to specialize in unless you have a philosophical and theological foundation.
Before I began studying the classics, before I began Classical Studies, I was a pre med major. I was studying biology and chemistry at the University, and as I was going through my science studies, I started to realize that the sciences led me to questions, controversial questions, ethical questions, moral questions that even though I was a great science student, I had no way to answer questions about morality in different areas.
For example, if we get into questions about things like whether abortion is okay or not, that’s really not a scientific question. That’s really a moral question, and the knowledge that’s needed to begin to answer that question is completely unknown to a student who has only studied math and science classes. To talk about things like assisted suicide, like if a person has a terminal disease, so the person has a disease and it doesn’t appear that there’s any chance of them recovering, is it okay for them to choose to simply end their life? That’s not a scientific question. That’s a philosophical question.
Questions about the origin of the world, where did man come from? Is man a product of evolution, or was man created complete in his present form, at the beginning of the world? When was the beginning of the world? All of these questions that came up in my science studies couldn’t be answered by scientific knowledge, and I realized that there was a lot of knowledge that was needed that I had none of. I didn’t have any way to answer these kinds of questions, and it was only my religion, my Christian faith, that made me feel like there should be a certain answer to these questions. I had sort of a vague sense that one view was right and one view was wrong, but I had no way to prove it. I had no way to articulate that or explain exactly what I felt. It was just this vague feeling of right and wrong.
And I realized that I was going into these sciences and going into these fields, and I didn’t have any of the foundational knowledge that was going to be necessary to do good work in these fields. I couldn’t answer these moral or ethical or philosophical questions that were coming up that were very important in these studies.
And so that’s what actually led me to realize that before I got myself into trouble, I needed to step away from scientific studies and devote myself to theological and philosophical or classical studies first. And that’s what led me to study classical studies at the university, to get into Logic and languages and philosophy, moral philosophy, theology and so on. And in God’s providence, I got so into classical studies and philosophy and theology that I never went back to modern natural sciences, but that’s what ultimately led me into classical studies in the first place.
It was seeing how much knowledge is needed for any kind of good work or decision making in the modern natural sciences, how much knowledge was necessary that was not being provided to us in our modern education, and I converted at that time to classical studies.
So when we come to the classical liberal arts academy, what we see is a complete curriculum of study. It begins with classical studies. It begins with the development of language skills, since language is extremely important for any kind of scientific investigation, as we mentioned before, definitions, drawing logical conclusions, all of that requires very, very accurate usage of language, and most students can’t do that.
We’ve got to study grammar, we’ve got to study the art of reasoning. We’ve got to study the art of rhetoric for effective communication. We’ve got to study classical mathematics. The four different kinds of quantity are very important in the study of logic and natural philosophy. We’ve got to learn the principles of moral philosophy, of natural philosophy and metaphysics, we’ve got to learn theology.
We’ve got to learn about what has been revealed by God, to teach us things that our senses and reasoning will never be able to figure out. I mentioned before questions about the origin of the world. No human beings were present at the origin of the world. There’s no history written. There’s no record that narrates the events that took place when the world began.
So there’s no way for human beings to be able to answer those important questions unless God, who was present as the creator in some way might reveal them to us. So we should expect some kind of divine revelation of that kind of knowledge that would be reasonable and necessary. And we find that in theology, in the study of divine revelation.
So all of that is included in the classical liberal arts academy. It’s always been the curriculum that’s been pursued by wise men and saints through history. And what’s an important point that often gets ignored is that most of the famous scientists that we can name from history were not men who were immersed in modern science studies, but they were men who were raised with classical education, who knew philosophy, who knew theology and applied themselves to solve problems or answer questions in the natural sciences. They were classically educated scientists, and that’s the vision that we should have when we talk about education for the modern sciences.
Now, as far as the modern sciences go, it’s biology, chemistry, physics, and then we get into divisions of those major sciences. But again, the major sciences are biology, physics and chemistry. We study them from modern textbooks. We learn what is known or what is taught in modern universities and schools concerning those subjects.
But as we do so, we don’t just gobble up all the information and spit it back out. We study and learn the information that is presented to us through the modern sciences, and we analyze it, we reflect on it in light of our knowledge of philosophy and theology, and by doing so, we can often recognize things that seem to be likely true, and we can also recognize things that seem to not likely be true.
We can also use our knowledge of the classical liberal arts to draw conclusions, as I said before, to reflect on the data, reflect on information, and evaluate what the conclusions or the implications of that data might be, what sort of insights might be drawn from that data. Our study of the classical liberal arts helps us with that kind of work.
We use our knowledge of moral philosophy to make decisions about things in the modern sciences that have moral implications, we use our knowledge of theology to think about what God has revealed, what is God’s will. This often relates to moral things, but also the worship of God, and we ask questions in the modern sciences in the light of our knowledge of theology or divine revelation.
So by laying that foundation of Classical Studies and philosophy studies and theology studies, we prepare ourselves to enter intelligently and thoughtfully into the modern sciences, and that should make us better scientists, should make us valuable, useful scientists that have important insights and principles to direct these investigations.
So we don’t choose between classical education or modern education. We place modern education in the context of classical education, and use classical education as a guide for our studies in modern subjects in modern education. So the two work together. If we separate them, we lose the benefits of both. If we bring them together, we maximize the benefits of them all, and they’re all necessary.
So what we promote in the classical liberal arts academy is both Classical Studies and Modern studies within the context of Classical Studies, critical modern studies. So for example, when we study modern textbooks, we’ll always reflect on the lessons in the modern textbooks and ask, what’s the philosophical importance of this information, of this data, of this knowledge, what are the philosophical implications? Are there any problems with anything that we read in this chapter on this topic? Are there any theological conflicts that arise based on what we’re reading? Can these things be reconciled with what we know about philosophy or what we know about theology?
Those kinds of critical discussions and questions is what makes the study of the natural sciences truly Christian studies of the natural sciences, and that’s our goal in the classical liberal arts academy.
So some students may have no interest in that. Some students may say, I want to devote myself to philosophy. I want to devote myself to the humanities. I want to devote myself to theology or to the languages. And others may say, I want to devote myself to modern mathematics or to the modern natural sciences or to chemistry, to computer science, whatever. That’s all fine, and that’s all part of discerning our vocation and finding occupations in the world, which is very important.
But the foundation of Classical Studies gives us the direction, gives us the framework in which we can pursue knowledge in all of these different subjects and have extraordinary insights into them that makes us useful and that makes us capable of actually solving problems, answering questions and doing good work in our own generation, in modern times. So that’s the vision of classical and modern education in the classical liberal arts academy.
And remember that while our program is open to school age students who are seeking K to 12 education, high school diploma, college preparation and so on, it’s also open to adult students for lifelong studies, because there’s no reason these studies end when we finish high school or get a college degree. These studies should be engaged in for our whole lives.
And the classical liberal arts academy, I think, is one of the only schools that students can get started in when they’re young children and continue through to the end of their lives. So all students of all ages are always welcome to study with us. Whether you’re enrolled as a free student simply exploring subjects on your own time with your own goals, or whether you’re a fully enrolled student seeking a certificate or a diploma, many different options intended for students of all ages.
It’s real lifelong classical Catholic education, and it includes modern studies. So that’s the vision in the classical liberal arts academy for the study of modern sciences. And that’s what I would argue makes for a great modern scientist to actually imitate the great discoverers of the past, the great scientists who made great breakthroughs in different fields, discovered different things, had insights that pierced through problems and found solutions. We very often find that those were men who had strong foundations in philosophy and theology, and that’s the kind of scientists that we want to be.
So having said all of that, I invite you to check out the classical liberal arts academy, visit our website, look at our curriculum, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. And most importantly, get involved. Join us for studies and get in touch. I’d love to know your thoughts about these topics, your own experiences, as I’ve shared many of mine.
But I’d like to invite you to join us for studies and provide whatever feedback you’d like, ask any questions, because I’d love to talk about these topics and help you enjoy the best education possible. So again, my name is William Michael. I’m the founder and headmaster of the classical liberal arts academy, and I hope that’s a helpful discussion of the relationship between Classical Studies and Modern natural sciences.
God bless your studies,
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy