The thought and works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin represent the widest and deepest attempt to reconcile Christian theology and the scientific worldview of biological evolution. Teilhard de Chardin noted the peculiar contributions of modern science to the vision of creation. Arguing that evolution moves toward complexity and consciousness, he noted that the order implied by creation is in the future and is achieved as a result of both the mechanisms of evolution and the action of humankind. The theological vision of the movement of creation toward unity, redemption, and salvation is now referred to as the evolutionary universe.

Early life and influences

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born in Sacernat in the French region of Auvergne in 1881, a year before the death of Charles Darwin. Teilhard died in New York in 1955. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1899 and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1911. A year later he started his scientific training in natural science with a special interest in paleontology at the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, under the direction of Marcellin Boule, one of the most eminent human paleontologists of that time. There Teilhard completed all his scientific training until the doctoral thesis.

Teilhard de Chardin's vocation became clear to him during the first world war; he wrote in his diary: "I would like to reconcile with God what is good in the modern world—its scientific intuitions, its social desires, it proper criticisms" (Journal, pp. 90–91). For Teilhard, one of the great novelties of the modern world was evolution: the theory that life, Earth, and the whole universe are subject to a nonreversible change over time. From his point of view, evolution was not only a theory to be investigated, but also the scientific description of a peculiar way of creation, which required new approaches from theologians and philosophers "The adoption of the evolutionary mode for the formation of the world implies a particular mode of appareance 'ex nihilo subjecti' and suggests that this world has a deep ontological reason" (Journal, p. 264).

After completing his doctoral degree, Teilhard became chair of geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris. There, together with the French philosopher Edouard LeRoy and the Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadskij, he coined the word Noosphere, which he defined as the totality of all thinking creatures, "the psychically reflexive human surface." According to Karl and Nicole Schmitz Moormann in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, L'oeuvre Scientifique, Teilhard also started to envision a new global approach to evolution as a matter concerning the whole biosphere.

Darwin and evolution

In the meantime, he wrote a private note on original sin, in which he suggested that, in an evolving universe, order is not to be found at the beginning, only to be ruined by human sin, but order will come in the future and has to be constructed by human action. According to Teilhard, there is no gap in the history of life, no nature uncorrupted before sin and corrupted after sin. The mechanism of biological evolution, which involves the undeterministic and dramatic events first elucidated by Darwin, are present from the very beginning of life and are a general characteristic of the evolution of the universe.

Teilhard's unconventional views resulted in his removal from his academic chair and his invitation to stay in China. Yet his theological revolution was only beginning. Because the promise of order resides in the future, he speculated, Christians are not only asked to reach their own eschatological salvation in paradise, but also to construct the Earth and a new type of human on Earth. At the end of the process of evolution humankind will reach a single point of convergence, the Omega Point, where there will be the second and final coming of Christ. A new ontological value is suggested in this scientific description of nature: evolution as movement toward an endpoint, a goal. The deep meanings of the universe, from both the theological and philosophical points of view, are related to this idea of movement toward something: of matter toward life, of life toward consciousness, of consciousness toward the thinking creature and the Noosphere, the Noosphere toward the Omega Point. Teilhard considered this movement the result of the complexityconsciousness law and he argued that it recovers the theological necessity for the emergence of humankind.

Teilhard was well aware of new research and discoveries in evolutionary biology. He was most interested in the aspect of Darwinism in which chance plays a central role, but he thought that a correct scientific analysis would be able to demonstrate the presence of canalisation (the determination of a direction to evolution in a - particular phyletic branch) and parallelisms (phyletic branches that separate off a common branch evolve in parallel and develop similar characteristics). In fact, Teilhard discussed the parallelisms of primates toward increasing brain size in his first scientific papers as a trained palaeontologist. For Teilhard, if there is a general movement that characterizes evolution, this movement has to be evidenced from an experimental point of view. He grappled with the question of how to reconcile this vision with the revision of Darwinism called modern synthesis, which was in vogue at the time Teilhard was working in palaeontology and which seemed to deny any epistemological meaning to evolutionary direction.

Teilhard de Chardin believed that only a global experimental approach could demonstrate the directional movement of evolution. Most palaeontologists relied on fossil records, and the lack of a broader global approach by the proponents of the modern synthesis, who used a reductionistic approach based on genes and populations, was the epistemological reason for their rejection of the idea of evolution as moving toward a goal. Some of the innovations of biology, for example, the global approach and the definition of biology as the science of complexity, were developed by Teilhard in an attempt to answer questions posed by theology.

Global approach

Central to the evolution of Teilhard's thought was his move to China in 1923, where he worked on the geology, palaeontology, and paleoanthropology of the Asiatic continent. Here, he was able to study evolution on a large scale, both in time and space, and the possibility of a global approach to evolutionary biology became more possible. He intended such a global approach to be part of his program of studying the biosphere, and the continental evolution that he had in mind at the time was an epistemological tool, by which he could study the evolution of the biosphere on a reduced scale but without distortions.

A new model of the interaction of science and theology became apparent: Some of the characteristics of theology, such as the eschatological movement toward an endpoint, and some level of necessity of the thinking creature, are recovered as the metaphysical frame of a true scientific research program. In addition, research that describes the evolution of the universe and its mechanisms can form a starting point for a new theological program. The epistemological model of Teilhard, presented in the introduction of The Human Phenomenon (1955), is that there are points where science, philosophy, and theology converge, and these points must be handled in the correct way. The main philosophic frame is that of totality because it is the concept of totality that requires general connections, but totality is also the way to propose the global view in construction of evolutionary theories concerning the biosphere. The peculiarities of the whole can be lost in a reductionistic approach. Teilhard wrote these ideas in letters from China just after an expedition in the Gobi desert, where he envisioned the mystical experience of totality and where he was inspired to write the "Mass on the World." There is the possibility that mystical knowledge, or at least mystical experience, was at the very basis of his research program.

Geobiology

From these connections, Teilhard de Chardin developed the notion of "complexity" and proposed a new science called geobiology, the science of continental evolution, which he intended as part of his global program to study evolution. He was able to develop an experimental approach to fossil evolution that showed that evolution is characterised by canalisation and parallelisms. The main parallelism, at least in animals, was the moving of different evolutionary branches toward increasing cerebralization, which Teilhard saw as experimental proof of the directional movement of evolution. The present day discussion about the increasing in complexity of life evolution has in Teilhard one of its forerunners.

Finally, developing Teilhard's vision, evolution is moving toward complexity and consciousness with mechanisms not strictly deterministic: There is room for chance and blind movements. Teilhard looked for philosophical and theological meanings of these mechanisms, and found them in the idea of freedom. He believed that freedom is the third ontological characteristic of the universe suggested by modern science.

These mechanisms are not proof of the lack of purpose or design, but they are compatible with the idea that design implies freedom and that the nondeterministic structure of the universe is the only way to allow room for the free action of the thinking creature. The lack of order at the beginning of the universe gives the thinking creature room for free action in order to conduct general movement toward the Omega Point. The creation and evolution of the Earth is owed to (or thanks to) the freely accepted alliance of creator and the created. The synthesis of interaction of science and faith finds here its climax.

See also CHANCE; CHRISTIANITY, ROMAN CATHOLIC, ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION; COMPLEXITY; CONVERGENCE; DARWIN, CHARLES; EMERGENCE; EVOLUTION; FREEDOM; INCARNATION; MYSTICISM; PALEONTOLOGY

LUDOVICO GALLENI