What exactly is “Nature”? It is at once one of our most familiar words and concepts; and at the same time, one of the most mysterious. We understand artificial things, what they do and why they do it and how they came to be, because we make them. But what makes a natural thing be what it is, and do what it does? And why does it always (or usually) do one thing in a given circumstance rather than another?
We can't ask questions about Nature without also asking questions about modern empirical science. What exactly does modern science teach us about Nature? The Nature that we experience on an everyday basis is full of beauty and purpose, as well as cruelty and chaos. Is this common experience a naive illusion, and Nature nothing but purposeless particles in motion according to inexplicable laws, the "things" of common experience nothing but arbitrary arrangements of an underlying quantum flux?
Are the natural sciences the only means by which we can answer those kinds of basic, rational questions about Nature? Or are the kinds of answers typically given by science—answers in terms of mathematical laws and mechanical causes—inherently limited, unable to encompass what we otherwise know to be true in other ways?
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