Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writes in The Phenomenon Of Man (1955), “We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is possibly the most inspired Christian writer of the 20th century. Unfortunately many thinkers have not taken his innovative thinking seriously today. However, his work bridges science and religion, ushering in a new age of creativity and Christianity itself.

Teilhard de Chardin explains that there are three major phases of evolution here on earth. The first phase he believed started when life was born from the development of the earth biosphere. The second phase began at the end of the Tertiary period as humanity developed its ability to be a reflective thinker. With thinking comes communication and then the third phase of evolution occurred. This is where Teilhard gets metaphysical, believing that a “thinking layer” of the biosphere is this third phase of evolution and it is called the noosphere (from the Greek noo, for mind). Starting small at first, this noosphere continues to grow, and will continue to grow, in the age of electronics. “Earth crystallization” is how Teilhard described the noosphere around Earth, “A glow rippled outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever-widening circles…till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.”

He is describing a thinking membrane covering the planet, the living earth which we hear of so much today, Gaia, a biological entity with a brain. Teilhard wrote that the noosphere “results from the combined action of two curvatures—the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of the mind.” This cosmic mind is the mind of God and all creatures are a part of this God. In a way, the noosphere could be thought of as “mass consciousness.”

Teilhard was a visionary who perhaps saw the Internet coming 50 years before the actual electronic web encircling the Earth today appeared. The internet itself could be considered a noosphere of sorts. He visualized a vast thinking membrane coalescing into “the living unity of a single tissue” which envelopes our collective thoughts, experiences and feelings. In The Phenomenon Of Man, Teilhard wrote, “Is this not like some great body which is being born—with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory—the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?” What Teilhard saw evolving for the world of the future was a collective organism of mind. The internet itself may not be a sentient noosphere in the true definition of the word, but it is at least a collection of experiences and information much like the mass consciousness (noosphere) of the entire human race, past, present, and future.

In the section “The Illumination” of this work, The Phenomenon of Man (1955), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin informs us, “Certainly in our innermost being we feel the weight, the stock of good or bad obscure powers, the sort of definite and unalterable quantum handed down to us…from the past. With no less clarity we see that the further advance of the vital wave beyond us depends on how industriously we use those powers. How could we doubt this when we see them directly before us through all the channels of tradition, stored up irreversibly [in the] collective memory and intelligence of the human biota? Even under the influence of our tendency to disparage the artificial, we are apt to regard these social functions—tradition, education and upbringing—as pale images, almost parodies, of what takes place in the natural formation of species.”

He continues, “In short, the living being emerges from the anonymous masses through radiation of his own consciousness. His activity can be stored and transmitted by means of education and imitation. From this point of view, man represents an extreme case of transformation. Transplanted into the thinking layer of the earth, heredity, without ceasing to be germinal or (chromosomatic) in the individual, finds itself by it’s very life center settled in a reflecting organism, collective and permanent, in which phylogenesis merges with ontogenesis. From the chain of cells it passes into the circumterrestrial layers of the noosphere. Hence we were not saying enough when we said that evolution, by becoming conscious of itself in the depths of ourselves, needs only to look at itself in the mirror to perceive itself in depth, thereby deciphering itself. Free to dispose of itself, it can give of or refuse itself. If we are God itself, we can hold no outside influence or entity responsible for our success or failure.”

Bobby Metherne (www.doyletics.com/arj/cmfrvw.htm, 1998) touches on this evolutionary theme of the “thinking layer of the earth: “To understand the process that unfolds in the blossoming of a flower is to understand the entire evolution of the universe. For this process of flowering, in which the leafy plant reaches to create something that is unlike itself, requires it to reach into a higher plane, the astral world, for help, and when that help is bestowed on the plant, the flowering stage may proceed.” What would a romance, a birth, or a wedding be without flowers? We all respond to the flower’s astral light and this is what draws us to use them for these significant events in our lives. Metherne writes that “we humans are always like the leafy plant reaching above ourselves for the guidance and assistance to move into our flowering stage.” Steiner writes in Christianity As Mystical Fact (1910) “To attain insight is to unfold a new organ, an event comparable to a plant unfolding the color of its blossom out of its former green and leafy state.”

Paul Davies says in his book In The Mind Of God (1992), “The great diversity of forms and substances found in the physical world reflect the limitless variety of intrinsic properties. Set against this way of looking at the world were the monotheistic religions. The Jews conceived of God as the Lawgiver. This God, being independent of and separate from his creation, imposed laws upon the physical universe from without. Nature was subject to laws by divine decree. One could still assign causes to phenomenon, but the connection between cause and effect was now constrained by the laws of science. When we look at the relatively sophisticated society of Greek gods, we do not find the notion of an all-powerful cosmic lawgiver very evident. Creation is moved by the Gods rather than a God. Creation proceeds by committee rather than fiat. The view that laws are imposed upon, rather than inherent, was eventually adopted by Christianity and Islam too, though not without a struggle.” St. Thomas Aquinas viewed the innate Aristotelian tendencies as aspects of the natural world which were providentially employed by God. However, in this cooperative enterprise, their basic character was inviolate. According to this view, God’s relationship with nature is that of a partner rather than that of the sovereign. However, Aristotelian ideas were condemned by the Bishop of Paris in 1277, to be replaced in later doctrine by the notion of God the Lawmaker.

Newton believed that the designer of the universe used fixed mathematical laws. The divine machine was constructed by God itself. But did this Divine Mathematician simply build this world and then leave it to evolve on its own, to take care of itself? Does God actually watch over its running from moment to moment, day to day? Newton believed that the universe was saved from gravitational disintegration only by the grace of God, divine intervention.

Descartes and Leibniz believed God was the fountainhead and that “rationality that opens the door to the understanding of nature by the application of human reason, is itself a gift from God.” In Renaissance Europe, the justification for what we today call the scientific approach to inquiry was the belief in a rational God whose “created order” could be discerned from a careful study of nature. God’s laws came to be seen as immutable.

Paul Davies, in his book The Mind Of God (1992), says that the traditional God of Christian theology was developed, for the most part, by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. For St. Thomas Aquinas, God is a necessary, timeless, immutable, perfect, and unchanging being on which the universe depends utterly for its existence, but who in contrast is completely unaffected by the existence of universe. There is difficulty relating this God to a changing universe, a universe with beings of free will.

The global mind, the Net, that Teilhard wrote of in 1955, has come to pass. Teilhard was aware that evolution moves at a snail’s pace with dead ends and detours along the way. Connecting our neurons to the global net rising in the noosphere to the Omega point of global unity, he wrote, “expands our own awareness and allows us to embrace our collective unfolding complexity together.” Teilhard’s vision of the Net as a necessary component of humanity’s assent on the evolutionary ladder is now all but proven. Now the earth needs all humanity to build the envisioned noosphere of Teilhard de Chardin. This group mind found on our Internet today must translate to an enlivened relationship with our earth. When this happens, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon Of Man (1955:293-294, 296) tells us, “we have the beginning of a new age. The earth ‘gets a new skin.’ Better still, it finds its soul.” This is definitely a metaphysical idea as well as an idea had by Christian thinkers.

He continues, “As early as in St. Paul and St. John we read that to create, to fulfill and to purify the world is, for God, to unify it by uniting it organically with himself. How does he unify it? By partially immersing himself in things, by becoming ‘element,’ and then, from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the control and leadership of what we now call evolution… And when he has gathered everything together and transformed everything, he will close in upon himself and his conquest, thereby rejoining, in a final gesture, that divine focus he has never left. Then, as St. Paul tells us, God shall be all in all.” Chardin considers this a superior form of “pantheism” without extraneous implications.

“If the world is convergent and Christ occupies its center, then the Christogenesis of St. Paul and St. John is nothing else and nothing less than the extension, both awaited and hoped for, of that noogenesis in which cosmogenesis—as regards our experience—culminates. Christ invests himself organically with the very majesty of his creation… Evolution has come to infuse new blood, so to speak, into the perspectives and aspirations of Christianity.”

“Christianity shows itself able to reconcile, in a single living act, the All and the Person. Alone, it can bend our hearts not only to the service of that tremendous movement of the world which bears us along, but beyond, to embrace the movement in love… In other words can we not say that Christianity fulfills all the conditions we are entitled to expect from a religion of the future; and that hence, through it, the principal axis of evolution truly passes, as it maintains?”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon Of Man (1955) sums it up in the following:

“i. Considered objectively as a phenomenon, the Christian movement, through its rootedness in the past and ceaseless developments, exhibits the characteristics of a phylum.

ii. Reset in an evolution interpreted as an ascent of consciousness, this phylum, in its trend towards the synthesis based on love, progresses precisely in the direction presumed for the leading shoot of biogenesis.

iii. In the impetus which guides and sustains its advance, this rising shoot implies essentially the consciousness of being in actual relationship with a spiritual and transcendent pole of universal convergence.