Well, I didn’t really want to write about him — and told someone I wasn’t going to — but he’s on my mind a bit, and I don’t have time to find another topic, because my novel writing is still overwhelming my imagination. 

The Pope commented on Teilhard de Chardin while he was visiting Mongolia, presumably because that’s where Teilhard did some of his work. Pope Saint John Paul II also quoted something the guy said, at some point in the 1990’s, so I’m not picking on the Pope here. 

Teilhard was supposed to be both a scientist and a theologian; that is purportedly part of his charm. He was a paleontologist in the early 1900’s and is somehow associated with the Piltdown Man hoax. I went and looked up his connection. First, a timeline: After the initial find of bits of skull that were supposed to be the missing link between men and apes, Teilhard went to the dig in Essex, England, and found another piece of bone. This one was supposed to some sort of tooth, but was broken at a critical juncture. Hence, it could not be used to prove top and bottom parts of the “skull” belonged together (especially since they didn’t) but it was used as a sort of Wow! Look how close we got! deal. Later another bit of bone was found. And later still, the whole thing was shown to be a fraud. But, before it was proven to be a fraud it was used as a cudgel against the Church.

Teilhard, who died in 1955, was so closely identified with the situation that over the last thirty years he has been accused of being either the person who actually perpetrated the hoax, or an accomplice, either for an unknown reason, or because he was actually someone who loved jokes and pranks. Since part of the “evidence” for this is that he was uncomfortable talking about Piltdown Man in the latter part of his life, I’m very agnostic. He doesn’t have to be the perpetrator to be ashamed. Maybe he was ashamed of being taken in by the hoax, as he should have been. 

This brings me to comments I remember vaguely from my father. He said the bones were so outlandish compared to what most of the field of human bones was showing, that it was an inexcusable mistake for a scientist to make, to believe so wholeheartedly. He also said that scientists thought Teilhard was cool because he was a theologian and theologians thought Teilhard was cool because he was a scientist. But, said my father, he wasn’t that good at either one. 

Well, so I went and looked up some of Teilhard’s writings. Here’s one. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/human-rebound-of-evolution

This one was easily accessible online. It’s from 1948 and it is his own words.

     “… by virtue of the acquirement of the gift of individual reflection, Man displays the extraordinary quality of being able to totalize himself collectively upon himself, thus extending on a planetary scale, the vital process which causes matter … to organize itself …” 

???

No idea. It’s part of his discussion of evolution but still… There are other places where he makes clear that he sees no particular distinction between life and non-life. To be fair to the guy he lived before the modern understanding of DNA and how it affects life. I’m pretty sure Watson and Crick published in 1953 two years before de Chardin died. 

Teilhard goes on to say, later in the paper, that in order for Man to grow to his full potential he must believe in immortality. (Well, umm, okay?) Therefore, immortality must be an intrinsic part of the physical universe. (Well? I don’t think this is okay.) Maybe I have the paper wrong. Maybe I don’t. He talks of Christianity as “…immortalizing and personalizing in Christ … the time-space totality of Evolution.”  The fuller quote is, “personalizing in Christ, to the extent of making it lovable, the time-space totality of Evolution.” This is really an odd reason for believing in Jesus. 

    More. “Despite a regrettable recrudescence of racialism and nationalism which, impressive though it may be, and disastrous in its effect upon our postwar private lives,  seems to have no scientific importance …” because, says our friend, nothing can stop the pressures that are going to bring us together, as some human whole. Three years after World War II, he says “a regrettable recrudescence” is of no particular importance because science says we are all going to be united humanity. I can’t even. 

One of the charges against Teilhard is that he didn’t believe in evil, and the foregoing is certainly evidence in that direction. 

I found a paper from a guy at Concordia Seminary (Lutheran) from 1965. https://scholar.csl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1791&context=bdiv He discusses the “Evolutionary Theology” of Teilhard de Chardin and the paper is very useful. Its author was trying hard to present different sides of what Teilhard said, and what his critics said, without trying to figure out who was right. So, a useful semi-primary source. 

He quotes Teilhard as saying that “the underlying assumption is that life has always been present within the deepest reaches of all matter. It did not suddenly burst forth at some definite instant and place.” This is very revealing. 

Anthony Flue an atheist scientist who worked on the origins of DNA for most of his life became a theist before he died. He simply could not see how to get to the first strand of DNA from all the material lying around the universe, without Divine Intervention. After that, anything. But before that? No Life. 

But for Teilhard, all matter had a consciousness and a striving toward life. The paper makes clear that some of Teilhard’s ideas about striving and consciousness are very attractive. When he talks about God, he can sound amazing. And he can sound very Christian if you read him out of context. But he seems to say that we will all become part of God, and LOSE our individuality. This isn’t Christianity.

The author of the paper quotes a critic of  Teilhard who is disagreeing with him over the idea that union with God comes about through evolution. I think this IS what Teilhard said. The critics unite in saying that Teilhard does not think there is evil. He does not see a fundamental twist in man’s nature that leads him to commit sin. This means also that the Crucifixion does not mean that God took on man’s suffering in order to redeem individuals. I really could not stand that part. 

Teilhard was also accused of being so imprecise in his definitions of various words, he used or invented, that he was close to heresy. He discussed something called the Omega point which is God, or the culmination of the evolution of the universe — or both. If he is confusing the natural and the supernatural then he’s wrong, and this is the exact point on which he was warned by the Church to stop writing. 

The author of this fascinating paper points out the oddity of the Catholics condemning Teilhard for this confusion, and the Protestants condemning the same confusion, but declaring that it comes from those wretched Roman Catholics. 

Reading all this makes me feel tired and slimy. 

**TL:DR  You can find some amazing quotes from Teilhard but they are wrapped around something really fundamentally wrong. (So I haven’t provided any.)