David Grumett, “Review Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolutionary Natural Theology,” Zygon vol. 42, no. 2 (2007): 519-534.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin develops, as is well known, a model of evolution as a convergent progression from primordial multiplicity through increasing degrees of complexity toward a final Omega point of spiritual consummation. Grumett explores how Teilhard fuses Darwinian and Lamarckian theories of evolution in developing his own, and in particular his defense of the view that Lamarckism is fundamental to a proper understanding of evolution’s human phase. Teilhard thus presents an invigorated natural theology grounded in evolution that confirms and completes a dynamic and teleological view of the cosmos. Teilhard’s point is that the evolutionary process, once correctly understood, itself provides evidence supporting the proposition that the world is intelligently designed.[1] Teilhard argues specifically against the equation of evolution with Darwinian selection, promoting another evolutionary theory, instead, in order to complement the Darwinian one. Lamarck, the Napoleonic deist heralded at the base of his statue in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris as “Fondateur de la Doctrine de l’Évolution,” argued that all organic evolutionary change is governed by a primordial sentiment intérieure situated within an overarching teleology provided by a universal power that orders the universe.[2] Teilhard explicates the theological implications of Lamarckism in order to compensate for the deficiencies in Darwinism. Teilhard asserts, the theories of both men contain a “great deal of defective explanation and false philosophy.” In particular, neither includes in its explanation a primal transcendent cause of material existence or evolutionary change.[3] Teilhard advocates the view of the Big Bang associated with James Jeans, that the world in its earliest period consisted of a diffused atmosphere of extremely low density, which he terms a “primordial chaos.”[4] Convergence in evolution suggested to Teilhard that something more than purely random processes was at work in generating evolutionary change. Teilhard’s perspective is supported by the array of evidence recently presented by Simon Conway Morris[5] in support of the ubiquity of evolutionary convergence in a universe of exuberant biological diversity. Conway Morris portrays evolution as unfolding according to a necessarily preordained path, but he draws, as will be seen, very different theological conclusions from this fact. In Teilhard’s theological cosmology, God becomes the “Prime Mover, Gatherer and Consolidator, ahead of us, of evolution.”[6]
The concept of “pangenesis”—which refers to the tendency of biological life to create new forms by means of inherited characteristics, generated internally and independent of external selection pressures—recurs in Darwin’s works. This lends weight to the suggestion that he never effected a complete break from Lamarckism.[7]
[1] David Grumett, “Review Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolutionary Natural Theology,” Zygon vol. 42, no. 2 (2007): 520.
[2] Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984).
[3] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Vision of the Past, (London: Collins, 1966), 81.
[4] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, (London: Collins, 1964), 102.
[5] See Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2005), and Simon Conway Morris, “Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation,” Science and Christian Belief 18 (2006): 5–22.
[6] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Man’s Place in Nature, (London: Collins, 1966), 121.
[7] Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. 2d ed., vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1899), 349-399.