What a Phenomenon! In Memory of Teilhard de Chardin

In 1962, I purchased and carefully read The Phenomenon of Man, the magnum opus of French paleontologist and Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who was born 145 years ago on May 1.* Teilhard died on Easter Sunday in April 1955, the month before I graduated from high school. It was not until ’62, though, that I heard of, and was challenged by, him for the first time. 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was his full legal name when he was born in 1881. “Teilhard” was the core family surname and “de Chardin” was the inherited second surname from his mother’s noble line. The double surname originated in 1841, when Pierre‑Cirice Teilhard (his grandfather) married Victoire Barron de Chardin.

Although ordained as a Jesuit priest, Teilhard became a paleontologist (a scientist who studies past life as known from fossil remains). His research, coupled with his belief in the Creator God, led him to an evolutionary worldview that culminates at the “Omega Point,” the grand fulfillment of creation.

Here is an introduction to three contemporary scholars who were significantly influenced by Teilhard.

Brian Swimme (b. 1950) is an American mathematical and evolutionary cosmologist who teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He grew up in a Catholic tradition, which clearly impressed him, and as one reviewer says, there a strong "incense scent of religiosity" to his work. But he does not publicly claim to be a Christian now.

Interestingly, though, Swimme has adopted Teilhard’s thinking that everything in existence has both a physical and a spiritual dimension, and he believes the universe is evolving with a telos (goal or purpose) of beauty. Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation has promoted his ideas, along with other Teilhard scholars who are clearly Christians.

Journey of the Universe (2011) was co-written by Swimme, and he is the personable narrator of that beautifully done film, which clearly show his affinity with Teilhard. It portrays well the sense of evolution as a sacred, universe‑wide process moving toward greater complexity and consciousness (which is what Swimme terms beauty).

Watching Swimme’s movie filled me with a sense of the Creator's awesomeness and the universe's splendor. I highly recommend the film, which is currently available on various streaming platforms.

Simon Conway Morris (b. 1951), a groundbreaking paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, was awarded the 2026 Templeton Prize last week (on April 21). It is valued at over $1.4 million and one of the world’s largest individual awards.**

According to Religion News Service, when he was about seven, Simon’s mother “gave him an album of stamps depicting various pre-historic animals and dinosaurs. This prompted him to go fossil-hunting and inspired a lifelong fascination with the evolution of life.”

Morris has spoken publicly about coming to Christian faith and rejecting materialism. He candidly states that he is “convinced of the truth of the Gospels.” Looking at how the universe has evolved, Taylor says he believes “God is the agent of creation” and is “happy to be known as a Christian.”

Ilia Delio is a Franciscan Sister and American theologian specializing in the intersection of science and religion. She has been associated with Rohr’s Center since 2013, and he explicitly identifies her as an expert on Teilhard. She is said to have “a widely appreciated gift for making Teilhard’s brilliant but dense writings accessible.”

Delio’s Christ in Evolution (2008) is the book most scholars point to as her most sustained and direct engagement with Teilhard. In it, she works through his positing of Christ as the future fullness of the whole evolutionary process, the Omega Point, where the individual and collective adventure of humanity finds its fulfillment.

That book established Delio’s reputation as Teilhard’s premier contemporary interpreter and led to her being called “the most prolific Teilhard interpreter in the English-speaking world today.”

I close with words widely attributed to Teilhard: “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient to reach the end,” but “it might take a very long time.”

Note: I am grateful to my friend Claude (Anthropic’s AI) for research and writing assistance in the preparation of this article.]

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  * Teilhard’s book was first published under the title Le Phénomene Humain in 1955, and the first English translation was issued in 1959. The title of a new translation, published in 1999, is The Human Phenomenon (the title that the first English translation should have had).

** The award was established in 1972 by John Templeton (1912~2008), a Presbyterian Christian from Tennessee who became a global investor and philanthropist.

Not All Laws are Good Laws

Perhaps you don’t know (or remember) anything about the Butler Act, a new Tennessee law signed in 1925, but you are likely aware of the well-known trial that resulted from that law.

John Washington Butler (1925)

The Butler Act was signed one hundred years ago on March 21, 1925 (which happened to be my father’s tenth birthday), by Tennessee Governor Austin Peay.

John Washington Butler (1875~1952) was a corn and tobacco farmer northeast of Nashville, Tennessee, and a member of that state’s House of Representatives from 1923 to 1927. The bill that bears his name was passed by a lopsided vote of 71-5 without hearings or debate, and then also passed by the state Senate.

In May 1925, John Scopes (1900~70), a high school football coach and part-time teacher, was arrested for teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act. His trial was held in Dayton, Tennessee, from July 10 to 21, and he was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Dubbed at the time “the trial of the century,” the Scopes trial pitted the iconic Clarence Darrow as the defense lawyer and prominent politician William Jennings Bryan as the prosecuting attorney.*¹ As depicted superbly in the movie Inherit the Wind (1960), Scopes was judged guilty and fined $100.*²

In the trial’s aftermath, Tennessee disallowed the teaching of evolution in the classroom until the Butler Act was repealed in 1967. It was then determined that, after all, the 1925 law was a bad law, as it conflicted with modern science and also increasingly had lost the support of many (progressive) Christians.*³

Many “bad laws” have been opposed by civil disobedience. As stated in an online dictionary, civil disobedience means “the refusal to comply with certain laws … as a peaceful form of political protest.” That refusal is because of the perception that some laws are bad and should not be obeyed.

Here are just a few notable historical examples of such “disobedience”:

* Mohandas Gandhi’s protest against the salt tax in India. This month marks the 95^th anniversary of Gandhi’s historic “salt march” that began on March 12, 1930. It was in opposition to the salt tax levied by colonial Britain, which he saw as an oppressive, unjust law.

* Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s protest against the Nazi government in Germany. The Lutheran pastor was one of the best-known opponents of Adolph Hitler, who was democratically elected but soon gained totalitarian control over Germany in 1933 by means of his laws and the use of the Gestapo.

* Martin Luther King Jr.’s protest against the racial injustices in the U.S. According to Copilot (Microsoft’s AI “companion”) King “believed that moral principles were more important than unfair laws, so he “used civil disobedience not just to make a political statement but to really change society.” This included the march to Selma and “Bloody Sunday” 60 years ago in March 1965.

Civil disobedience to bad laws is often costly for the protesters.

* Gandhi was arrested on May 5, 1930, while on his salt march and sent to jail without trial where he remained until near the end of January 1931.

*Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 and was imprisoned until his execution by hanging 80 years ago next month, on April 9, 1945.

* King was arrested 29 times and jailed, usually for rather short times, on many of those occasions. His most well-known incarceration was in April 1963 when he wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail, during the week he was there.

Now, by contrast, the U.S. President seems to be a “scofflaw.” While the term originally meant disregard for minor laws, scofflaw now sometimes is used for a person who disregards court orders, thus directly challenging judicial authority.

This is the opposite of disregarding bad laws. It is harmful opposition to good laws, such as protecting people’s civil rights. Since his inauguration on Jan. 20, the 47^th POTUS seems to have made many executive actions harmful to women as well as to LGBTQ and non-White people.

For example, during the past few days, the Trump administration has deported three planeloads of Guatemalan immigrants to El Salvador in spite of a federal judge’s temporary restraining order questioning the legality of that action.

That conflict may be fomenting a constitutional crisis according to the news media, such as this detailed March 17 article on the website of Reuters.com.

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*¹ In 2023, Gregg Jarrett, a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, published The Trial of the Century, which, “calls upon our past to unite Americans in the defense of the free exchange of ideas, especially in this divided time.” The author describes it on YouTube here.

*² In recent years, it is often implied that $100 was just a token fine for John Scopes breaking the Butler Act in Tennessee. According to Wikipedia, however, his fine was equivalent to $1,793 in 2024.

*³ As I point out in my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020), the Scopes Trial led to the weakening of Christian fundamentalism (2020, pp. 34~37).

Darwin, Pro and Con

Who was born on February 12, 1809? Yes, Abraham Lincoln was born on that day—and so was Charles Darwin. Lincoln is 15^th on the list of “The 25 Most Influential People of All Time” (see here). Darwin is #9 on that same list, largely because of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, his revolutionary book published 160 years ago, on November 24, 1859.

Darwin’s Discoveries

Born about 175 miles northwest of London, from 1825 to 1831 Darwin studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and then went to the University of Cambridge to study for an ordinary degree, the usual preliminary for theological training.

Rather than becoming a medical doctor or a clergyman, though, Darwin became a natural scientist, and his voyage on HMS Beagle (1831~36) established him as an eminent geologist.

Based on his meticulous scientific research, by the end of that decade he had mostly constructed his theory of evolution, although his seminal book on that was not published until 20 years later.

On the Origin of Species led to a revolution in the way human beings thought about the world and themselves. As a 1999 essay in the Scientific American says, “Almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principles.” 

Darwin’s Detractors

From the beginning until the present, however, Darwin has had his distractors. In the years following the publishing of his groundbreaking book, there were scientists who did not agree with his assertions.

By the 1870s, though, the scientific community and most of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact.

The main detractors have been Christians whose belief in a literally interpreted Bible caused them to oppose evolution of the natural world, including humans. One of the contemporary evangelical Christian leaders of this opposition to Darwin was Phillip E. Johnson (b. 1940), who died last month.

Darwin on Trial (1991) was Johnson’s influential book widely read and cited by conservative Christians.

Darwin’s Defense

Since I am not a scientist, I have no way to authenticate Darwin’s scientific assertions. As a student of Christian theology and philosophy, I can (and will) offer a limited defense of Darwin.

I suppose there was a time when I did not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution as being correct—but even though I grew up in a conservative Baptist church, I don’t remember that ever being a live issue.

I also don’t know when it was that I first accepted evolution as being “true,” but by the time I had finished my seminary and graduate school courses/seminars under Dr. Eric C. Rust, my major professor, I no longer had any qualms about affirming the truth of evolution.

Because of Dr. Rust, who was a trained scientist as well as a theologian, I accepted a both/and position with regards to science and religion rather than an either/or position. That meant accepting both evolution and divine creation—and a rejecting both Darwinism and creationism.

The importance of that position became abundantly apparent when I began teaching Christian Studies to non-Christian students in Japan. Almost without exception, the students had been taught evolution in high school and believed it to be scientifically true.

Of the (literally) thousands of non-Christian students I taught, if presented the choice between science (evolution) or Christianity based on a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories, 99% or so would most likely have quickly chosen science.

I was happy to be able to emphasize that such a choice is not necessary. It was only in my last years in Japan that I was able to augment my assertions with the writings of Catholic theologian John Haught of Georgetown University.

Haught’s books God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (2000) and Deeper Than Darwin (2003) are highly significant books for theologically evaluating evolution. I highly recommend them.