How does Teilhard see ‘evolution’ differently from traditional science and religion?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw that Teilhard considered his ‘lens of evolution’ to offer a way to clarify the reality in which we are enmeshed.  The concept of ‘evolution’, however, especially as Teilhard understood it, itself needs to be clarified if we are to do so.

This week we will look at how his insight is quite different from traditional perspectives, and thus opens a path to the integrated and wholistic perspective that Teilhard developed.

The Evolution of Evolution

Nearly all scientists and many religious thinkers (at least from the liturgical Christian expressions) recognize that the things we see around us emerged as part of a process generally referred to as ‘evolution’.  Simply stated, this term refers to the assertion that all things come to be from things which preceded them.  This simple assertion is the starting point for Teilhard’s insight that evolution offers a lens to understand reality:

“Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.”

That said, there is a decidedly wide spectrum of understanding how this action of ‘coming from’ can be seen to occur.  At one end of the spectrum, strongly held in the conservative religious camp, a supernatural being simply created, ‘from nothing’, everything that exists.  To conform to the scientific fossil record, it all didn’t occur instantaneously but was sequentially created to give the appearance of doing so.  At the other end, strongly held by the more materialist scientists, the process by which things come to be what they are is understood as governed by pure chance, combined with ‘Natural Selection’ in which those random combinations of cells which survive will engender offspring and those that don’t will not.

Another issue which separates these two poles is the question of time span.  In the former, God can create what’ he’ wants in any order, beginning with the finest grains of ‘the stuff of the universe’, in as little as six thousand years.  To the scientist, this ‘stuff’ must somehow get to a very high degree of organization before Natural Selection can kick in, and this requires billions of years.  For example, it is necessary for evolution to first effect very complex inorganic molecules, such as amino acids, proteins and DNA before the emergence of the very first, most simple cells can begin.

The concept of evolution is so common today that it is difficult to realize just how recently it has risen in our collective consciousness.  It was only a little over a hundred years ago that Darwin published his thesis on biological evolution, an evolutionary ‘blink of the eye. This thesis, albeit with many variations, still stands as the most accepted scientific approach to understanding the origin of living things on this planet.

Within fifty years after Darwin, however, science began to extend its inquiry beyond living things on our planet and into the nature of the entire cosmos.  With thinkers such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, supplemented by advanced instruments and computational systems unimaginable in Darwin’s time, science has begun to grasp the true immensity of the universe, not only in space but in time as well.

This new awareness of the seemingly infinite duration of time that it took the universe to organize into the configuration we see today also opened the question of “how did this happen?”  The discipline of Physics has continued the task of expanding our understanding of this organization with its ‘Standard Model’.  The Standard Model of the late twentieth century identifies the basic building blocks of matter, the order of their appearance and their energies of interaction, although with many gaps still to be filled.  Many of its basic assumptions have been independently tested and verified, thus offering our best and most comprehensive understanding of matter in a universal context.  Its underlying assumption is that the universe becomes what it is via the processes identified in the Standard Model; from such minute granules as quarks, through increasingly intricate components such as electrons, atoms and molecules into those which are capable of supporting the functions that we refer to as ‘living’.

Science’s monumental expansion of insight into cosmic reality, however, still possesses a gaping hole.  While the evolution of living things is somewhat explained by Natural Selection, there is no underlying concept for how the elemental granules identified by the Standard Model came to be configured into complex entities, such as DNA, which are necessary for the emergence of the cell.  The passage of time alone cannot alone account for the rungs of complexity mounted by the elemental ‘stuff of the universe’ as it precipitated sequentially from a featureless quantum of energy into such increasingly complex entities as electrons, atoms and molecules.

There’s a third stage of evolution to be considered in addition to the material and biological, that of ‘thought’.  The theory of Natural Selection works well in explaining the evolution of living things, but less so in explaining the rise in biological complexity leading up to the human, seen in such phenomena as ‘consciousness’ and ‘culture’.  Further still, the principles of biological Natural Selection would seem to apply poorly to the explanation for the subsequent evolution of the individual human person in the context of society.  The phenomenon of consciousness and an understanding of how it plays out in human culture therefore continues to be at the edge of the grasp of biology.   It is common for biologists to simply ignore human evolution at the level of consciousness, other than in the biological sense of random genetic mutation of human ‘morphology’.  That humans continue to evolve, however, cannot be denied even if the underlying principles of their evolution remain obscure.

Thus, we can see that while the term, ‘evolution’ is quite commonly used, the actual process to which it refers is much more comprehensive than can be seen at first glance.

Next Week

This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by recognizing that the term, “evolution” does not have a common meaning

Next week we will use Teilhard’s lens of evolution to see how this ‘phenomenon’ is the essential activity in the universe as it unfolds into its current complex state.

 Last Week

Last week we introduced a new edition of the blog, “The Lens of Evolution of Teilhard de Chardin’.

This Week  

This week we will see how Teilhard understood that the most essential aspect of universal evolution can be found in the tendency of matter to become more complex over time.  Understanding how this tendency can be found in all aspects of the universe’s coming to be, including how it manifests itself in human is essential to the ‘sense making’ that Teilhard’s lens can provide.

Teilhard’s Unique Understanding of Evolution

Before we can begin to understand how his ‘lens’ can be used to make sense of everything we see and to address and heal the many ‘dualisms’ that have risen in humankind’s attempt to understand reality, we must first address his comprehensive understanding of ‘evolution’.  In his masterwork, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he emphasizes in very strong terms how he considered evolution as such to be an underlying context for understanding reality.

“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow: such is evolution.”

   His repetition of the term ‘all’ indicates his belief that putting everything that can be seen into the context of evolution will result in a significant clarification of the reality which surrounds us.  Such a context, however, is not one that can be easily found in ‘conventional wisdom’.

To begin with, the term ‘evolution’ itself is not one which on which significant agreement exists.  The most common use seems to be that of biology’s theory of ‘Natural Selection’, first proposed by Charles Darwin and limited to a process of successive reproduction and differentiation on a small planet during the small universal time scale of a few billion years.  Teilhard, recognizing the incompleteness of such an approach, insists that any perspective which purports to address all of reality must address, as Julian Huxley says in his introduction to the “Phenomenon”

“…the material and physical world,… the world of mind and spirit.. the past with the future; and of variety with unity, the many and the one.”

      Thus, if Teilhard’s use of the term ‘evolution’ is to meet his lofty intent it must offer an approach to understanding all phenomena over all stretches of time and all expanses of space.

Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ embraces everything by placing it into a natural context which can be approached in empirical terms, from physical events in the past, to the oft confusing cacophony of current human affairs.  It goes forward to address the bridges to a future that will take us to the ‘fuller being’ that the fourteen billion years of uplift in the universe suggests is possible.

To identify evolution as the underlying principle which explains the appearance of things as quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, neutrons, humans, poems, songs and cultures, it is necessary to first identify a metric which is common to all, and therefore by which all things can be seen in a unified context.   Again, from Teilhard

“Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.  But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness.  And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.

   And in that ‘elaboration’, Teilhard suggests, can be found the missing metric.

“There is not one term in this long series (from quarks to persons) but must be regarded, from sound experimental proofs, as being composed of nuclei and electrons.  This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes.  In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of ‘complexification”.

   Hence, recognizing that the universe unfolds in the direction of increased complexity is a necessary first step for understanding how everything fits together.  This “increase in complexity” is therefore one of the first things to be seen as we look through the ‘lens of evolution’.   Seen through his ‘lens’, the phenomenon of evolution is expanded from the narrower context of biological replication on a small planet over a relatively short period of time into a truly universal process by which everything that can be seen comes into being.

Science is in general agreement that biological evolution proceeds by way of ‘Natural Selection’, but Teilhard shows how not only is Natural Selection dependent on a ‘pre-biological’ stage of evolution (producing such things as atoms, molecules and DNA), but leads on to a ‘post biological’ stage in which things such as human relationships, conscious decisions and cultural norms are required for future development.
Such a triad of modes of evolution can also be seen, although rarely, by others.  The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins addresses these three waves of evolution in his book. “The Selfish Gene”:

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet.  It is still in its infancy, drifting around in its primordial soup, but is already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.  The new soup is the soup of human culture” and the new replicator “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission”.

   Dawkins acknowledges that genetic evolution is still active in the human, but, as he puts it, is “panting far behind” that of human cultural transmission as humans continue to evolve.  In Teilhard’s insight of ‘complexity’ as the essential ingredient of universal evolution, we can use his ‘lens’ to trace its rise through human history, how it manifests itself today, and to begin to see how it can continue its unfolding into the future.

More importantly, we can begin to trace the tracks of increasing cosmic complexity upon our individual lives if we know how to look.  He provides an example of the focusing of his lens when he says

“I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (becomes human) in him.”

Next Week

This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by understanding that the fundamental metric at work in the evolution of the universe is the ‘phenomenon of increased complexity’.

Next week we will look a little more closely at how this ‘phenomenon’ can be seen as the essential activity active in the universe as it unfolds into the state that can be seen today.