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Can Biology, Taken to its Extreme Limit, Enable us to Emerge into the Transcendent?

May 1951

Teilhard de Chardin argues that biological evolution relies on a “zest for life” or survival instinct. If humans perceive the universe as closed with no transcendent escape from total death, this zest would vanish, halting evolution. Thus, evolution can only continue if seen as irreversible and transcendent, ultimately leading to God.

Written for Semaine des Intellectuels catholiques and later published in Science and Christ.

If biology is taken to its extreme limit in a certain direction, can it effect our emergence into the transcendent? To that question, I believe, we must answer that it can: and for the following reasons.

Although we too often forget this, what we call evolution develops only in virtue of a certain internal preference for survival (or, if you prefer to put it so, for self-survival) which in man takes on a markedly psychic appearance, in the form of a zest for life. Ultimately, it is that and that alone which underlies and supports the whole complex of all the bio-physical energies whose operation, acting experimentally, conditions anthropogenesis.

In view of that fact, what would happen if one day we should see that the universe is so hermetically closed in upon itself that there is no possible way of our emerging from it—either because we are forced indefinitely to go round and round inside it, or (which comes to the same thing) because we are doomed to a total death? Immediately and without further ado, I believe—just like miners who find that the gallery is blocked ahead of them—we would lose the heart to act, and man’s impetus would be radically checked and ‘deflated’ for ever, by this fundamental discouragement and loss of zest.

That can mean only one thing: that, by becoming reflective of the evolutionary process, can continue only if it sees that it is irreversible, in other words transcendent: since the complete irreversibility of a physical magnitude, in as much as it implies escape from the conditions productive of disintegration which are proper to time and space, is simply the biological expression of transcendence.

Evolution, the way out towards something that escapes total death, is the hand of God gathering us back to himself.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

https://www.organism.earth/library/docs/pierre-teilhard-de-chardin/headshot-square.webp
An image of the subject.

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