Acta Apostolicae Sedis - Commentarium Officiale796

V

Ad Plenariam Sessionem Pontificiae Academiae Scientiarum.*

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am happy to greet you, the members of the Pontifical Academy of

Sciences, on the occasion of your Plenary Assembly, and I thank Professor

Nicola Cabibbo for the words he has kindly addressed to me on your behalf.

In choosing the topic Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe

and of Life, you seek to focus on an area of enquiry which elicits much

interest. In fact, 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 natu-

rally 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. Philosophy in its early stages had pro-

posed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more

elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but

rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal

interpretation of the origin of the world. 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 tran-

scendent 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. Thomas Aquinas taught that the no-

tion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of

events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways

* Die 31 Octobris 2008.