Different sciences

It’s easy to forget that “nature” means the essence or form of something.  Over the centuries this morphed into nature as a “natural world” as if only some things have a nature, which is mistaken.  Every thing or being has a nature, including God.  A natural science is the study of things/beings with a common nature or essence.

There is a hierarchy of natures/essences.  People have a human nature which includes the properties of an animal nature.  Animals have an animal nature which includes the properties that living beings in general have.  This should mean that the sciences of biology, zoology, and anthropology are related as a hierarchy.

Evolutionism undermines this hierarchy.  Evolutionism makes zoology a mere subset of biology.  But zoology should be more: it should be concerned with how the natural kind called “animal” is different in kind, not merely in degree, from other living beings.  Evolutionism denies that some beings are different in kind from other beings.  In fact extreme evolutionism makes everything from molecule to man to differ only in degree, not in kind.  Hence evolutionists talk about “science” rather than “sciences” because the differences are considered minor.

Different sciences should be distinguished according to the different kinds of things/beings that are studied.  This applies to geology, for example.  If geology is merely physics applied to earth, it is different in degree but not in kind from physics.  Geology should be understood as studying a unique kind of thing, the earth.  We could we even distinguish antediluvian geology as a separate science since the earth then was different in kind, not just in degree.

October 2013