Nature is not chaos but a “book whose author is God,” says Pope

In an address today to the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Benedict XVI looked at the relationship between faith and evolution. In it he began by saying that science and Christianity are not in contradiction, explaining for instance that “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.”

Thus, the image “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.”

 “This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book”. In effect, “[n]otwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is ‘legible’. It has an inbuilt ‘mathematics’. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a ‘cosmography’ studying measurable phenomena but also in a ‘cosmology’ discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos.”

“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: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom.”

This, according to Benedict XVI, shows how “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.”

Finally, quoting John Paul II, the Pope concluded, saying that “scientific truth, which is itself a participation in divine Truth, can help philosophy and theology to understand ever more fully the human person and God’s Revelation about man, a Revelation that is completed and perfected in Jesus Christ.”