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Teilhard, Evolution, and Intelligent Design The central motivating concern in Teilhard’s intellectual life was his effort to reconcile his profound loyalty to the Catholic Church and its teaching with the seemingly contradictory scientific world view derived from the perspective of evolution. Teilhard’s accomplishments as a paleontologist, including, for example, his participation in the team which discovered Pekin Man, brought him international recognition among his peers. As a scientist, he was convinced that the evolutionary understanding of reality was irrefutable and that, unfortunately, the conventional formulation of the Church’s teachings clashed with it. He took it upon himself, therefore, to restate these teachings in an evolutionary form. It was not simply that the creation story as described in the book of Genesis cannot be taken literally. He knew that the biblical version, understood as myth, remains inspiring and true on its own terms, even if not in historical terms. He was well aware that spiritual truth is poorly expressed in literal language; indeed, his skill in using metaphor and coining new words for new concepts was remarkable. The difficulty with Genesis is that it describes a static world, one in which God created everything that needed to be created once and for all. From this perspective, therefore, Noah needed to gather a pair of each kind of animal into the ark; any left behind would be extinct after the flood. Teilhard understood that the world revealed by science is not static but dynamic, where evolution is the mechanism of creation. He was aware of the importance of evolution not only in the origin of life, but also of the earth and of the very universe. His genius went further to describe the evolution of human consciousness leading to the development of a noosphere, a thinking layer above the biosphere. He saw it all as a single organic process, one which would culminate in what he called the omega point, a grand union of perfected human beings into an assembly of unified consciousness. With a vision which was essentially mystical, he saw divine presence permeating the entire universe, including its evolutionary dynamics. Teilhard’s view went far beyond Darwinism, encompassing both the geological evolution of the earth and the cosmogenesis of the universe. Nonetheless, it was the Darwinian aspect which most directly seemed to challenge traditional religion and to trouble literally minded fundamentalist Christians. It is well understood by today’s scientists that the process of natural selection, the “survival of the fittest,” as described by Darwin, is inadequate to describe the reality and requires correction. The most significant extension has come from the realization that species do not evolve singly and independently. Rather, a changing environment calls forth an adaptation of the species, but at the same time a changed species triggers changes in the environment. What evolves, then, is not species but ecosystems. This aspect is so important that some scientists no longer speak of evolution but rather of co-evolution. There are other aspects of Darwinianism that have come under attack under the concept of “intelligent design.” In its simplest terms, the scientific (as opposed to the religious) proponents of intelligent design point out certain gaps in the Darwinian formulation and propose a hypothesis to be studied, tested, and subjected to peer review: that the evolution of life, particularly of human beings, cannot be accounted for by assuming gradual changes over long periods of time but rather require the operation of an intelligence carrying out a design. This hypothesis does not require the designer to be a personal God, but, of course, a traditional believer could comfortably interpret it in that way. Perhaps the earliest popular elaboration of the arguments for intelligent design was a book by biochemist Michael J. Behe entitled Darwin’s Black Box. Behe considers that there are a number of biochemical processes which involve a sequence of reactions requiring enzymes and the mechanisms for assembling them. If any were missing, the process simply would not work. It seems evident that the gradual evolution of a particular process could not explain its appearance, since the individual parts would confer no adaptive advantage unless all parts were present. Behe draws the analogy of a bicycle evolving gradually by small steps into a motorcycle. Superficially, it might seem that one could gradually transform a bicycle into a motorcycle by adding this and modifying that, step by step. In fact, however, adding a piston or a carburetor or a fuel pump would not make a motorcycle; it would be a working motorcycle only when the entire engine and its associated systems were present together. If we considered a bicycle and a motorcycle side by side, we would have to conclude that someone with intelligence needed to design the transformation of the one into the other. Scientist proponents of intelligent design insist that their project is a scientific and not a religious one -- they hope to expose the gaps in Darwinianism and if possible devise any modifications which may be needed. They have distanced themselves from religious fundamentalists who are trying to use the concept of intelligent design to force school boards to require a religious account of creation along with what they refer to as the “theory” of evolution. Teilhard, of course, goes far beyond classical Darwinianism. He is not at all content with evolution as simply a random process; he insists that a universe which does not seem to be going anywhere, to have no purpose, can be inhabited only by despairing nihilists. To the contrary, he sees all of creation as sacred, with human beings participating fully in the divine work of evolution. He might well have been comfortable with such terminology as intelligent design, understood in his own way. He would understand the intelligence of the universe as being embodied at this point in evolution within the noosphere, with human beings taking evolution into our own hands. In the most profound sense, now that the thrust of evolution has shifted from the biological to the cultural, we humans are designing the future. We need not hesitate to understand ourselves as having the divine power and human responsibility to bring about the coming utopia which Teilhard calls the Omega Point.
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