September 25, 2024 – Introduction to the ‘Lens of Evolution’ Of Teilhard de Chardin

   Developing a perspective in which everything can be seen to make sense

This Week

This weekly blog has been in process for several years now.  It has focused on the writings of the Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, and on how they offer a wonderful and highly integrated insight into the universe we inhabit, and more importantly, the part we play in it.  The blog continues to grow as my awareness of the world, as seen through his unique perspective, slowly begins to take shape.

Making Sense of Things

We live in a reality which often does not make sense.  While global human welfare in general can be seen to increase over time, and most of us obviously benefit from it, the future today seems ever more unreliable in comparison to a past which becomes more tolerable as we move further from it.  Today’s currents are felt to be carrying us into a fickle tomorrow in which the successes of yesterday are not guaranteed.

Our ever-increasing technology, while it grants us certain respites from the labors of the past, seemingly undermines this ‘progress’ by exposing the possibility of a future of diminished energy, shortages of necessities and one rife with human conflict.  Even the unprecedented tightening of the web which connects us on so many levels is shot through with a dystopic framing of current events. News of conflicts, pandemics, and shortages all reflect a generally negative view of the human condition.

And, adding to this is the sense of the world closing in on us.  With the ever-increasing human population on a planet of restricted space and limited resources, one scarcely able to bear our weight upon it today, surely there will come a time that the human wave will crest and crash back into a dark void.

The Economist, a well-respected global magazine, reported on this pervasive sense of dread a few years back. They cited the many polls that identify generally comfortable people who nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human history, breaking a long-sensed bond between ‘comfort’ and ‘happiness’.  This new ‘dualism’ can be seen in the newly emerging group of individuals who are relatively well-off and well-educated: the ‘middle class’.  Evidence of this ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly comfortable people vote for political parties which would upend a status quo which had previously supported a high level of life satisfaction.

The statistics presented by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”, outline how the general improvement in global human welfare very clearly suggests an upward trend towards a positive future.  However, Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, notes a rising sap of pessimism, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores such data or rejects it outright.

Obviously, such dystopia requires a view of reality that is antithetical to the data which it seems to reflect.  What is needed is a perspective grounded in an objective assessment of existence, in which such phenomena can be put in context.

A casual look at our two major systems of understanding reality, science and religion, quickly surfaces their limitations in such assessment.  Religion’s many tangled threads of supernaturalism, otherworldliness, dogmatism and antiscience compete with its positive insights into human nature for our attention.  Science, on the other hand, with its astounding success in articulating what we see in the universe around us, still fails to offer succor for the threads of fear that persist in our existence.

Both, however, carry threads of insight into both the human condition and the place of the human species in the cosmic scheme of things.  What is needed is an integrated context into which these threads can be knitted.

Such an integrated context can be found in the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, and philosopher is most noted today for his insights into religion, spirituality and mysticism, but in this book we will widen the net to explore the application of his thinking to the wider scope of universal evolution and how it is playing out in human affairs today.   In seeking a more comprehensive grasp of reality, and our part in it, we will explore the phenomena of evolution, religion, science, and life in Teilhard’s integrated context.

The Evolutionary Perspective

Humanity’s earliest records address attempts to ‘make sense of things’.  Such ‘sense making’ seems to be required for humans to not only survive in a world rife with danger, but to arrange themselves in increasingly complex arrangements in doing so.  Evidently, belief in an underlying causality of events helps to add the confidence necessary to deal with them.  As the many early writings found in ‘sacred texts’ reveal, attributing both ‘natural’ and human-caused phenomena to supernatural beings was effective in developing the confidence to deal with them.
The sophistication of ‘sense making’ increased with the complexity of society.  The ‘Axial Age’ (some eight hundred years BCE), for example, ushered in a trend towards a ‘person-centered’ causality instead of one centered on the supernatural.  As Karen Armstrong puts it in her book, “The Great Transformation”, during this time civilizations across the globe were beginning to rethink “what it means to be human”.
One of the results of this ‘rethinking’, also charted by Jonathan Sacks in his book, “The Great Partnership” was the rise of ‘empirical’ (as opposed to ‘intuitional’) thinking in ‘making sense of things’.  This of course led to the emergence of science in the great human enterprise.

The resultant conflict between this new mode of thinking and the traditional, well-entrenched institution of religion is well documented, as is the popular belief that while they might co-exist, collaboration is unlikely.

By the late eighteenth century, Science’s increased technology had enabled its inquiry into reality to extend to the entire cosmos.  Not only was ‘reality’ now considered much bigger in size but seemed to have a history of immense time as well.  These two recently discovered aspects added a third observation, that of universal evolution.  The universe, considered static for generations, was now seen as dynamic.
In this same time frame, while most Western theologians were resisting such ‘modernism’, a few were beginning to recognize how such cosmic insights might not be antithetical to the tenets of religion, but actually inform religious beliefs in a way that might stem the tide of secularism that science seem to be fostering.
One of the first was Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) who believed that this new cosmic vision could lead to a reinterpretation of traditional Catholic concepts in a way in which their inherent message could be seen as more relevant to human life.  As an example of such ‘reinterpretation’, in his book, “Man Becoming”, Gregory Baum cites such Blondel insights as

”Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”.

   As Baum saw it, Blondel’s recognition of a dynamic universe opened the door to recognizing how such traditional Christian concepts could be mined for their relevancy to human life.  He correctly identified one of the key contributors to the drift of contemporary religion towards increasing irrelevance.

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

   Teilhard de Chardin was no less concerned about the irrelevancy that dogged the traditional ‘extrinsicism’ of Christianity.  Like Blondel, he also recognized the immense potential that the new insights of science could bring to ‘reinterpreting’ traditional Christian teachings into terms more relevant to human life.
Unlike Blondel, Teilhard studied science much more intensely.  While Blondel opened the door to the recognition of how scientific insights could better focus religious concepts, Teilhard took the bold steps of doing so.  He recognized that a common hermeneutic between science and religion was essential to increasing religion’s relevancy.   He also saw how religion’s emphasis on the human person and his relationships could widen the scope of science to include the phenomenon of the human person.

Teilhard recognized that the starting point for such an audacious enterprise was the concept of ‘evolution’.  He envisioned a twofold expansion of this concept:

• science would open its concept of evolution beyond the Darwinist biological limitations to that of a phenomenon underpinning the evolution of the cosmos
• religion would recognize that such an understanding of the evolutionary process by which reality comes to be what it is provides an essential basis for a reinterpretation of its concepts in terms of human existence

Johan Norberg, a contemporary historian, summarizes many statistics to substantiate Teilhard’s general sense of confidence in the future (‘Progress”).  He and Teilhard both recognize, however, a headwind of pessimism that inhibits a general positive view of the direction of evolution in the human species.  This ‘headwind’ is indeed real and impossible to ignore.  It did not appear recently but depends on the existence of a dystopia that has been prevalent in human society since its beginnings and will continue as long as a narrow perspective of human existence persists.

Teilhard proposes a widening of this perspective as an antidote to this headwind.  If, he suggests, we can see ourselves in a context of reality which is evolving in the direction of ‘fuller being’, we will be able to

“..spread our sails in the right way to the winds of the earth and always find ourselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   This “spreading of sails” involves the recognition of a reliable causality in each of us that is always at work in our lives to bring us to an ever-fuller degree of ‘being’.  He asserts that such recognition will awaken us to our potential as human persons and provide the stimulus for our personal and collective fullness.  As he put it:

“.. I doubt that 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 (made human) in him.”

   In saying this, he is stating a belief that when we, individually and collectively, see ourselves as the current manifestation of the same energy that has breathed the universe into existence over the past fourteen billion years, the emerging confidence in this energy within us will enable us to overcome all obstacles to becoming more what it is possible for us to be.  As he puts it in more poetic terms, Blondel’s insight that the universe is ‘on our side’ allows us to perceive ourselves as being held in God’s hands.

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   To experience oneself as being held in the hands of God can truly count as a significantly ‘decisive moment’.  A person who feels that, as Maurice Blondel put it,

“The ground of being is on our side”

    will experience life quite differently than one who feels adrift in an uncaring, or even hostile, universe.

But the act of experiencing is very dependent upon understanding.  Considering the way that understanding contributes to belief, and hence the importance of such understanding, Teilhard develops a way of seeing that can contribute to this skill of sailing.  This mode of seeing is based on his grasp of all reality as it exists in a flux of a universal ‘becoming’.  It is his ‘lens of evolution’.

Next Week

Having restarted this blog in a new edition, next week we will go on to look at how Teilhard’s unique insights into cosmic evolution can provide a ‘lens’ for seeing how the past leads to a present with such a powerful potential for a future.