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.

This week we will look at how his insight is quite different from traditional perspectives, and move 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’, and this thesis, albeit with many variations, still stands as the most accepted scientific approach to understanding the origin of living things.

Within fifty years after Darwin, however, Science began to extend its inquiry into the nature of 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 several 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 state.