For a science curriculum to be ultimately effective it must meet the following criteria:
- It must recognize the purpose of the natural sciences.
- It must recognize the nature of the natural sciences.
- It must recognize and accept the limits of the natural sciences.
- It must rightly align the natural sciences with the rest of the curriculum: first, with the arts (the verbal and mathematical arts) that enable the sciences, and second with the higher sciences of ethics, politics, metaphysics, and theology.
I am prepared to argue, though history is only beginning to demonstrate this point, that failure on any of these four criteria ennervate and undercut the natural sciences. When that happens, they lose their integrity and become tools in the hands of lovers of power and people fall into despair.
The quest of the natural sciences, for example, to be the final authority on life and its meaning, has led to the conclusion by many who accepted the validity of this quest that life has no meaning.
