Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – Receiving the members of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences in an audience on October 31, on the occasion of their Plenary Assembly on “ Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life” the Holy Father Benedict XVI explained that “many of our contemporaries today wish to reflect upon the ultimate origin of beings, their cause and their end, and the meaning of human history and the universe. In this context, questions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise.”
In his address, the Pope recalled how Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II “noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences...A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence. To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously.”
Quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas, who taught that “ creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming,” the Holy Father recalled that the term “evolve” literally means “'to unroll a scroll', that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose 'writing' and meaning, we 'read' according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein.”
Thus, the world was not begun in chaos, but more like an ordered book. “Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is 'legible'...We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities... Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos.”
Concluding his address, Benedict XVI said that, “The distinction between a simple living being and a spiritual being that is capax Dei, points to the existence of the intellective soul of a free transcendent subject. Thus the Magisterium of the Church has constantly affirmed that 'every spiritual soul is created immediately by God – it is not ‘produced’ by the parents – and also that it is immortal' (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 366). This points to the distinctiveness of anthropology, and invites exploration of it by modern thought.” (SL) (Agenzia Fides, 3/11/2008)
