A plenary session of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences was held last week, and the Pope received participants in audience yesterday. Here's his address to them. Their topic was Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life, and therefore so was his.
questions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors 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.[snip]
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.That much is a matter of logic; we can arrive at it by reason, as Aristotle did, and not to arrive there is to remain stuck in unreason, in the circular logic of infinite regress. There has to be a beginning. That deduction, in fact, is the foundation of science; science can't exist without it. To be a scientist is to believe in a creator --even if you think you are an atheist.
RTWT. His thesis is that the world is not a chaos, but a cosmos. Lovely!
