Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, known as 德日進 Chardin (pinyin: Dérìjìn) in China, he searched for the human significance, the evolution process in relation to the Cosmos reality.
He said "Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. " (p. 219 of The Phenomenon of Man)
"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."
He was trained as a priest , but his work was not allowed to publish or teach his ideas in his lifetime.
Many Scholars nowadays think that his work is so steeped in a deep understanding of paleontology and evolutionary biology that it holds up remarkably well today.
Bill
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ (French)
1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955; was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of noosphere.
During his lifetime, many of Teilhard's writings were censored by the Catholic Church because of his views on original sin. However, Teilhard was praised by Pope Benedict XVI, and he was also noted for his contributions to theology in Pope Francis' 2015 .
Teilhard's spirituality was awakened by his mother, Berthe de Dompiere. When he was 12, he went to the Jesuit college of Mongré, in Villefranche-sur-Saône, where he completed baccalaureates of philosophy and mathematics. Then, in 1899, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Aix-en-Provence, where he began a philosophical, theological and spiritual career.
From 1905 to 1908, he taught physics and chemistryin Cairo, Egypt, at the Jesuit College of the Holy Family. Teilhard studied theology in Hastings, in Sussex(United Kingdom), from 1908 to 1912. There he synthesized his scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge in the light of evolution. His reading of L'Évolution Créatrice (The Creative Evolution) by Henri Bergson was, he said, the "catalyst of a fire which devoured already its heart and its spirit." His views on evolution and religion particularly inspired the evolutionary biologistTheodosius Dobzhansky. Teilhard was ordained a priest on August 24, 1911, at age 30.
From 1912 to 1914, Teilhard worked in the paleontology laboratory of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, in Paris, studying the mammalsof the middle Tertiary period.
Teilhard followed at the Sorbonne three unit degrees of natural science: geology, botany and zoology. His thesis treated of the mammals of the French lower Eocene and their stratigraphy. After 1920, he lectured in geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris, then became an assistant professor after being granted a science doctorate in 1922.
In 1923, he travelled to China with Father Emile Licent, who was in charge in Tianjin of a significant laboratory collaboration between the Natural History Museum in Paris and Marcellin Boule's laboratory.
From 1926 to 1935, Teilhard made five geological research expeditions in China. They enabled him to establish a general geological map of China. He joined the ongoing excavations of the Peking ManSite at Zhoukoudian as an advisor in 1926 and continued in the role for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of Chinafollowing its founding in 1928.
Henri Breuil and Teilhard discovered that the Peking Man, a group of fossil specimens was discovered in 1923–27 during excavations at Zhoukoudian (Chou K'ou-tien) , the nearest relative of Pithecanthropus from Java, was a faber (worker of stones and controller of fire). Teilhard wrote L'Esprit de la Terre (the Spirit of the Earth).
Teilhard participated in the 1935 Yale–Cambridgeexpedition in northern and central India with the geologist Helmut de Terra and Patterson, who verified their assumptions on Indian Paleolithiccivilisations in Kashmir and the Salt Range Valley. He then made a short stay in Java, on the invitation of Professor Ralph van Koenigswald to the site of Java man. A second cranium, more complete, was discovered. This Dutch paleontologist had found (in 1933) a tooth in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1934 that he believed belonged to a giant tall ape that lived around half a million years ago.
In 1937, Teilhard wrote Le Phénomène spirituel (The Phenomenon of the Spirit) on board the boat the Empress of Japan, He received the Mendel Medal granted by Villanova University during the Congress of Philadelphia in recognition of his works on human paleontology. He made a speech about evolution, origins and the destiny of Man. The New York Timesdated March 19, 1937 presented Teilhard as the Jesuit who held that man descended from monkeys.
1939: Rome banned his work L’Énergie Humaine.
During his return voyage to Beijing he wrote L'Energie spirituelle de la Souffrance (Spiritual Energy of Suffering) (Complete Works, tome VII).
1941: Teilhard submitted to Rome his most important work, Le Phénomène Humain.
1947: Rome forbade him to write or teach on philosophical subjects.
1948: Teilhard was called to Rome by the Superior General of the Jesuits who hoped to acquire permission from the Holy See for the publication of his most important work Le Phénomène Humain. But the prohibition to publish it issued in 1944, was again renewed. Teilhard was also forbidden to take a teaching post in the College de France.
1949: Permission to publish Le Groupe Zoologiquewas refused.
1950: Teilhard was named to the French Academy of Sciences.
1955: Teilhard was forbidden by his Superiors to attend the International Congress of Paleontology.
1957: The Supreme Authority of the Holy Office, in a decree dated 15 November 1957, forbade the works of de Chardin to be retained in libraries, including those of religious institutes. His books were not to be sold in Catholic bookshops and were not to be translated into other languages.
1958: In April of this year, all Jesuit publications in Spain ("Razón y Fe", "Sal Terrae","Estudios de Deusto") etc., carried a notice from the Spanish Provincial of the Jesuits that de Chardin’s works had been published in Spanish without previous ecclesiastical examination and in defiance of the decrees of the Holy See.
1962: A decree of the Holy Office dated 30 June, under the authority of Pope John XXIII warned that "... it is obvious that in philosophical and theological matters, the said works [Teilhard’s] are replete with ambiguities or rather with serious errors which offend Catholic doctrine. That is why... the Rev. Fathers of the Holy Office urge all Ordinaries, Superiors, and Rectors... to effectively protect, especially the minds of the young, against the dangers of the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his followers". (AAS, 6 August 1962).
1963: The Vicariate of Rome (a diocese ruled in the name of Pope Paul VI (who had just become Pope in 1963) by his Cardinal Vicar) in a decree dated 30 September, required that Catholic booksellers in Rome should withdraw from circulation the works of Teilhard, together with those books which favour his erroneous doctrines. The text of this document was published in daily L’Aurore of Paris, dated 2 October 1963, and was reproduced in Nouvelles De Chrétienté, 10 October 1963,
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
During his lifetime, many of Teilhard's writings were censored by the Catholic Church because of his views on original sin and unorthodox criticism to Christianity. He asserted that human consciousness is an aspect of evolution. Also that evolution has a goal, i.e. the increasing complexity of human consciousness (called noosphere) which will culminate in the final super-humanized form (p. 259) which the author calls the Omega point.
In "The Phenomenon Of Man", he started his position that mankind in its totality is a phenomenon , humanity also as a phenomenon, to be studied and analysed by scientific methods. His second point is that the Universe is one gigantic process, a process of becoming and attaining new level of existence and organisation. He concluded that since evolutionary phenomena ( including mankind ) are processes, they can never be evaluated in terms of their origins : they must be defined by directions, possibilities and limitations, and deductible future trends. He agreed with Nietzsche's view that man is unfinished and must be surpassed or completed. Evolution of mankind can become primarily a psychosocial process based on cumulative transmission of experience, knowledge , feeling and willing. He used 'noosphere' to denote the sphere of mind as a transforming agency promoting hominisation.
Evaluations by scientists
Sir Julian Huxley, evolutionary biologist and contributor to the modern synthesis, praised the thought of Teilhard de Chardin for looking at the way in which human development needs to be examined within a larger integrated universal sense of evolution.[30]
In 1961, the Nobel Prize-winner Peter Medawar, a British immunologist, wrote a scornful review of The Phenomenon Of Man for the journal Mind,[31] calling it "a bag of tricks" and saying that the author had shown "an active willingness to be deceived".
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called Medawar's review "devastating" and The Phenomenon of Man "the quintessence of bad poetic science".[32] Similarly, Steven Rose wrote that "Teilhard is revered as a mystic of genius by some, but amongst most biologists is seen as little more than a charlatan."[33]
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" by Theodosius Dobzhansky draws upon Teilhard's insistence that evolutionary theory provides the core of how man understands his relationship to nature, calling him "one of the great thinkers of our age". Key researchers credit Teilhard with the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis that accounts for natural selection in the light of Mendelian genetics.[citation needed]
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" is a 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist and Russian OrthodoxChristian Theodosius Dobzhansky, criticising anti-evolution creationism and espousing theistic evolution. The essay was first published in American Biology Teacher, volume 35, pp. 125–129.[1]
Dobzhansky first used the title statement, in a slight variation, in a 1964 presidential address to the American Society of Zoologists, "Biology, Molecular and Organismic", to assert the importance of organismic biology in response to the challenge of the rising field of molecular biology.[2]
Overview
Dobzhansky opens with a critique of Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the then Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, for holding a belief based on scripture that the Sunrevolves around the Earth. Dobzhansky asserts that "it is ludicrous to mistake the Bible and the Koran for primers of natural science. They treat of matters even more important: the meaning of man and his relations to God."[1]
As he had said in his earlier presidential address, "If the living world has not arisen from common ancestors by means of an evolutionary process, then the fundamental unity of living things is a hoax and their diversity is a joke."[2] These two themes of the unity of living things and the diversity of life provide central themes for his essay.
Addressing the diversity of life on Earth, Dobzhansky asks whether God was joking when he created different species for different environments. This diversity becomes reasonable and understandable, however, if Creation takes place not by the whim of the Creator "but by evolution propelled by natural selection."[1] He further illustrates this diversity from his own investigation of the widely diverse range of species of fruit flies in Hawaii. Either the Creator, "in a fit of absent mindedness" created many species of fruit flies in Hawaii, or the fruit flies that arrived on the islands, diversified to fill a wide range of vacant ecological niches.[1]
He illustrates the unity of living things using the molecular sequence of cytochrome C, which Emanuel Margoliash and Walter M. Fitch had shown to be similar in a wide range of species, including monkeys, tuna, kangaroos, and yeast.[1] This unity is further illustrated with by the similarity of the embryos of different species. Either God deliberately arranged things "to mislead sincere seekers of truth"[1] or these similarities are the result of evolution.
Dobzhansky concludes that scripture and science are two different things: "It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology."[1]
"I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way."
"Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts.... the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."
Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (1973)
Teilhard’s cosmic theology is largely predicated on his interpretation of Pauline scripture, particularly Colossians 1:15-17 (especially verse 1:17b) and 1Corinthians 15:28. Teilhard draws on the Christocentrism of these two Pauline passages to construct a cosmic theology which recognizes the absolute primacy of Christ. He understands creation to be "a teleological process towards union with the Godhead, effected through the incarnation and redemption of Christ, ‘in whom all things hold together’ (Col. 1:17)."[15] He further posits that creation will not be complete until "participated being is totally united with God through Christ in the Pleroma, when God will be ‘all in all’ (1Cor. 15:28)."[15]
Best Regards
Bill
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