[Editor’s Note: this is the fifth article in Sir Raymond de Souza’s Teilhard de Chardin series. Here are links to the first four –
Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a firm, enthusiastic believer in the absolute evolution of the species and of the whole universe. He never considered that the second law of thermodynamics disproved evolution as a scientific reality. His enthusiasm made him slide down the dizzying extrapolation ramp that extended from paleontology to philosophy and theology.
He came to the extreme of confessing his total belief in evolution of the world in these terms: “If, in consequence of some interior turnaround, I were to lose, successively, my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, my faith in the Spirit, it seems to me that I would continue to believe in the world. The world (the value, the infallibility, and the goodness of the world), such is, in ultimate analysis, the first and only thing in which I believe.” (Comment je vois, 1934, quoted in “Catolicismo”, São Paulo, Brazil, December 1962).
And the trendy nuns of Philadelphia want to make him a Doctor of the Church!
The French Jesuit even elaborated a strange vision in which the universe is presented as a reality in perpetual dynamism of cosmo-genesis. According to him, it is a cosmogenesis that, through his laws of evolution, gives rise to all beings in the universe, including living beings and even man, from the simplest cosmic elements, and, in some way, complements God himself (horresco referens!).
Father Teilhard de Chardin’s prestige as a paleontologist had declined enormously in the last years preceding his death in 1955. And the scientific criticism had produced, on that occasion, great devastation among the most important fossils, supposedly “proving” the theory of evolution, which he enthusiastically professed: Java Man (Pithecanthropus erectus), Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni), Peking Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis), all of them recognized as gross frauds or fanciful montages (publicized in “The Revolution, human phylogenesis and Father Teilhard de Chardin“, by Athanasius Aubertin, in “Catolicismo“, nos. 149, 151, 153, of May, July and September 1963).
Moreover, the ideas thus disseminated to the general public render an invaluable service to the forces of the dechristianization of the West. As they come from a member of a religious order of great past prestige (Society of Jesus) and because they are in accordance with both modernist conceptions and Marxist theses on the universe and man, they devastate certain Catholic circles.
In this sense, the testimony of one of the intellectual leaders of French Communism, Roger Garaudy, in his book “Perspectives de l’Homme“, is highly significant, when he makes the following observation: “From the history of the atom to that of man, from the dialectic of nature to morality, the Marxist philosopher and Fr. Teilhard de Chardin walked in unison. Further on the paths diverge, and the Marxist separates from Fr. Teilhard, not as two adversaries separate, but as two explorers who faced common adventures, and who undertook the climb of the summit on opposite sides” (op. cit., Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1959, p. 196). (Bold emphasis added).
To confront the multiple infiltrations promoted by the left through the propaganda of the works of that ardent preacher of evolutionism, which even reached Catholic seminaries, several authoritative voices were raised throughout the Church.
The most important was that of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office — today the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — in its Monitum of June 30, 1962, guarding ordinaries, superiors of religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities against the dangers of the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his disciples (cf. “Catolicismo“, nos. 140 and 144, August and December 1962).
Among the studies of great value similarly brought to light are the articles published in the journal “La Pensée Catholique” (Les Editions du Cèdre, Paris, the works of Fr. Philippe de la Trinité, O.C.D., of Rome, and those of Fr. Julio Meinvielle, from Buenos Aires) against Father de Chardin’s work.
Of the latter’s works on the subject, we highlight the book “Teilhard de Chardin o la Religión de la Evolución” (Ediciones Theoria, Buenos Aires, 1965), which presented a very lucid and well-documented critique, and which had provided precious subsidies for the elaboration of this work (particularly with regard to quotations from Teilhard de Chardin).
Itinerary of the thought of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin
What itinerary of thought did the author of “Le Milieu Divin” take to arrive, in the field of interpretation of the universe, at such surprising coincidences with dialectical materialism, recognized by the communist Roger Garaudy?
Father Teilhard began his activities as a paleontologist around 1913, when he became friends with Charles Dawson and collaborated with him in research at Piltdown, England, where the fraudulent ape-man was “discovered” (read: manufactured). He went to China in 1929 and there worked on the excavations of Choukoutien, staying for a long time in that region. Among his works with the greatest impact are “Le Phénomène Humain“, written precisely in Beijing in 1938. The Peking man was a complete bluff, as we have seen in a previous article.
The itinerary already reveals his tendency to generalize ideas formed in the field of paleontology, under the influence of his evolutionary dogma, to a much broader realm, and alien to his specialty, such as biology, anthropology, philosophy and theology.
Teilhard de Chardin had the weakness to let himself be carried away by a scientific theory that had its heroic phase in the 19th century. And the evolution of species ended up assuming for him the character, not of a working hypothesis, but of an incontestable principle of a metaphysical order!
This procedure would already be very compromising for the scientist’s reputation, who had to always check his theories with the observed facts, in order to verify whether or not they satisfy, and who must have the necessary detachment to reform them and even reject them, if need be.
However, the researcher’s attitude would become untenable – and even ridiculous – if the enthusiasm for the theories he accepts led him to make, based on them, extrapolations not only in the sector of experimental sciences, but in the sphere of philosophy itself, or even worse, of theology.
That’s what happened to our ‘Jesuit paleontologist’. According to him, nothing is immune to the unstoppable onslaught of evolution: from the most elementary particles scattered throughout the cosmos… to God Himself! Evolution was, in his distorted view, the law to which every being in the universe follows, including God Himself!
This means the explicit or implicit acceptance of pantheistic immanentism, which attributes to the universe the origin of all realities, contained in it since always, and gradually revealed by evolution over millions of years. Moreover, as we shall see later, this brings about a harmonization with Hegel’s pantheism, with the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, and with gnosis itself. And Teilhard was a Jesuit priest!
No wonder that Cardinal Gerhard Muller compared conscious evolution to Gnosticism, saying that it “does not offer anything which will nourish religious life”.
The 2nd law of thermodynamic (i.e., entropy) does not prohibit evolution because that only applies to closed systems, and the Earth is not a closed system. It receives energy from the sun.
The universe is a closed system so entropy must increase. Although the planets and galaxies are increasing order locally, that is offset by the increase in the total volume of the universe as it expands.