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| Pierre Teilhard de Chardin |
We know
from experience that man has a mind and consciousness. It is also evident that
animals seem to have more mental activities the closer they are to us. Thus,
mammals have more minds that reptiles, reptiles more than fish, fish more than
invertebrates (possibly excluding cephalopods). All animals except sponges have
a nervous system, although some have very little: the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has only 300 neurons.
Plants do not have a nervous system, but they have some sensitivity and are
able to move slowly. And when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganisms
in the seventeenth century, no one doubted that these tiny creatures were
alive. True, biologists have not yet agreed on whether viruses, even more tiny
beings, are alive or not. I have written about this in another post
in this blog.
In this
situation, thinkers tend to take one of the following two contradictory
positions:- Mind is an epiphenomenon with no
importance. At best, it is a secondary factor that helps the survival of some
species.
- Mind is the fundamental phenomenon in the
universe. Any cosmic explanation that overlooks mind is an invalid
explanation, for it leaves out the most important factor.
The Jesuit
paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin chose the second alternative, but
went a step further: if mind is the most important phenomenon of the universe, every
form of matter must possess it in some degree. Therefore, in addition to assigning
microorganisms an incipient mental activity, he proposed that all matter, even at
the most basic levels, such as atoms or electrons, must have a mental activity
of some kind, although in the case of inert matter that activity is undetectable.
We cannot see it, but it is there.
2015 marks
60 years since the death of Teilhard de Chardin, one of the key figures of the
twentieth century. He has been a source of inspiration for novelists, who have based
on him some of their characters, such as father Telemond, in The
Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West, or the exorcist in the novel of
the same name by William Peter Blatty. Both novels have been adapted
successfully to the movies.
Teilhard clashed
with his Jesuit superiors because of two short notes he wrote in 1920 and 1922,
where he described his ideas about original sin, which came into clear conflict
with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. These notes were not published until
1969, in the collection of articles Comment je crois, but they were enough
to make them forbid him teaching and publishing his books. However, he was not
forbidden to publish tens of scientific and philosophical papers in specialized
magazines, which have been included in eight collections issued between 1956
and 1973.
Although
Teilhard, in obedience to his superiors, did not publish any of his books during
his life, he left them ready to be published after his death. In 1955, the year
of his death, his first book appeared, The Phenomenon of Man, where he
describes his ideas from the scientific and philosophical point of view. This work
explains in detail, not just his theory of mind as a universal property of
matter, but also his predictions about the future: starting on present man, evolution
will cease to be divergent and will start to converge (perhaps today we’d call it
globalization)
towards a final critical confluence point: the Omega point.
Two years
later, his second book was published, The Divine Milieu, without reading
which it is difficult to understand his first. As I have mentioned in
another post in this blog, those who only read The Phenomenon of Man usually
think that Teilhard believed that the Omega point will be a kind of passing from
man to superman, something like God being created by nature. His ideas,
however, were precisely opposite, and The Divine Milieu makes it clear: for
Teilhard, the Omega point will be the encounter between God and man, the second
coming of Christ, the end of this world and a step through to salvation, not because
of human activity, but by being attracted by a previously existing God and
creator.
Apart from
his doubtful ideas on original sin, which outside the two short notes mentioned above did
not reappear ever again in his writings, Teilhard’s ideas were never officially
condemned by the Catholic Church (his works were not included in the index of
forbidden books) and they were vindicated in 1968, in the book Introduction
to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger, who a few years later became
cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and in 2005
Pope Benedict XVI.
In one of
my books, The fifth level of evolution, available as an e-book in
Spanish, I have described in more detail the life and work of Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, along with my own version of his ideas.
Manuel Alfonseca
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