Editor’s note: Today marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881–1955), whose evolutionary thought has attracted new appreciation in the Vatican, according to the National Catholic Register. The following is excerpted from A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, by Fr. Martin Hilbert, C.O., from Discovery Institute Press.

Teilhard has been dubbed “the Catholic Darwin,” although, strictly speaking, he was not a Darwinist. He was a paleontologist with his own particular understanding of evolution. As a young Jesuit studying theology in England, Teilhard was already enamored of natural history and evolution when he read Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice. “The only effect that brilliant book had upon me,” wrote Teilhard, “was to provide fuel at just the right moment, and very briefly, for a fire that was already consuming my heart and mind.” This understates the book’s impact. It proved influential on Teilhard’s outlook on matter, life, and energy.

Hope Against Suicide

Bergson was the philosopher whose lectures at the Collège de France were responsible for giving enough hope to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain not to go through with their mutual suicide pact. The two students were in the grip of despair engendered in them by everything else they were hearing in the lecture halls of French academia. Fortunately for the Maritains, they could accept the lifeline that was Bergson’s lectures, and then move on to Catholic truth interpreted through Thomistic philosophy. Teilhard, on the other hand, picked up Bergson’s penchant for spawning ­ neologisms — noosphere, hominization, etc. — as a means of appearing to say something profound. His writings caught the imagination of many religiously minded people who were looking for meaning in a world which, according to the prevailing view in the academy, was an eternally meaningless interplay of chance and necessity. Teilhard’s thought can perhaps be summarized as a vision of the universe ­ self-organizing into higher and higher levels of complexity until it reached its final ­ destination — the Omega point — which he endowed with some connection to Christ.

No doubt, Teilhard ­ had — and continues to ­ have — Catholic admirers. The most positive Catholic assessment I have encountered comes from the pen of Msgr. Bruno de Solages, Rector of the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, who praised the “magnificent coherence” of Teilhard’s view of evolution: “not materialistic, but essentially spiritualistic, not pantheistic but theistic, not deterministic but directed by God, not immanent but requiring the transcendental, not ­anti-Christian, but leading logically to the Christian supernatural.” He continues:

Within the framework of a Universe no longer cyclical as was the Aristotelian ­ system — a great clock which eternally ­ moves — but the Universe of modern ­ science — which is an evolutionary Universe in progress, and one which, unless it be radically absurd, must necessarily go in a certain ­ direction — Father Teilhard de Chardin successively demonstrates the personal immortality of souls, and the existence of a personal God, the motivating force of all this evolution…. And we find that the heart of these two demonstrations is really nothing else basically but the Aristotelian and Thomistic principle, desiderium naturae non potest esse inane. “The desire of nature cannot exist in vain.” Only, in place of applying this principle merely to the desire of a spirit, considered in its individuality, it is now extended to the totality of spirits, which is considered in the evolutionary perspective of the whole of modern science, as an actual term of the Universe.

Bad Philosophy, Bad Theology, Bad Science

On the other hand, Fr. Raymond J. Nogar, O. P., had this to say about Teilhard’s posthumously published The Phenomenon of Man: “Professional philosophers call it bad philosophy, professional theologians call it bad theology, professional poets call it bad poetry, professional scientists call it bad (mystical, which is worse) science, and, whatever its rhetorical advantage, professional dialecticians call it impossible dialogue.”

Outside of the Catholic world, some critics could be even more scathing than Fr. Nogar. Peter Medawar, a ­ hard-core evolutionist, wrote a review of The Phenomenon of Man: 

It is a book widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication a few years ago in France, and some reviewers hereabouts have called it the Book of the ­ Year — one a Book of the Century. Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense tricked out by a variety of tedious metaphysical conceits, and its author can only be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. The Phenomenon of Man cannot be read without a feeling of suffocation, a gasping and flailing around for sense. There is an argument in it, to be ­ sure — a feeble argument abominably expressed — and this I shall expound in due course; but consider first the style, because it is the style that creates the illusion of content, and which is in some part the cause as well as merely the symptom of Teilhard’s apocalyptic seizures.

Alasdair MacIntyre was also not impressed when the book was published in English in 1959.

Get your copy of A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design today and read in full Father Hilbert’s detailed critique of Teilhard’s thought. See also an accompanying article by Professor Robert Shedinger, “On the 70th Anniversary of His Death, Anything to Salute in the Thought of Teilhard de Chardin?”