There is a famous paper, written by Lynn White in 1967, about human carelessness regarding nature, and it holds up St. Francis as someone who can show us a better way. There is just one problem with this. St. Francis’s approach to nature was entirely intuitive, but is this still credible in an age of science?

Fraternal life was St. Francis’s paradigm for understanding it. Life in fraternity requires a spirit of obedience, which he took to extremes. In his Salutations of the Virtues, brothers are called to be obedient even to beasts and wild animals, “insofar as it has been given to them from above by the Lord.” St. Francis speaks while immersed in nature, seeing all creatures’ needs. Modern science, however, gives us a view from nowhere, setting aside such a personal view.

We have taken this to extremes. We see the history of the cosmos all the way back to the beginning. We consider not just the creatures of our own time but of all ages, known to us only indirectly through scientific investigation. We will be in awe of this view of the cosmos and the biosphere in its grandeur, far exceeding what little of time and space we actually experience. We can imagine standing next to God, admiring what God created.

Some writers have taken this part of science and, continuing the Franciscan tradition that started with St. Bonaventure, began there to move toward contemplation of God. But here is the problem: Do we begin with nature as cosmology and evolutionary biology, or do we begin with our natural bodies and the creatures that accompany us?

Obviously, the latter is the path of St. Francis. Most importantly, only the latter can lead to meaningful insights from nature that we can apply to understand our relationships with each other and all creatures.

Science that really matters to us is the kind of science that brings healing. This begins with understanding our human bodies and their goodness. Scientific progress in understanding the human body will not restore our bodies to perfect function, but let us live with their imperfections. Applying this knowledge wisely requires translating the scientific language of nature into the language of meaning in nature, our natural bodies, and their abilities and disabilities.

Seeing nature properly is not just to see how it functions so that we can fix it when it misfunctions. Seeing nature properly is firstly about seeing meaning in nature, and we see meaning both in function and dysfunction. What science of nature, most broadly understood, needs most of all is a philosophy of nature that connects being and meaning in such a way that one cannot be thought without the other.