Reader’s comment on Teilhard’s ‘silliness’

 

 

 

The Sheer Silliness of Teilhard de Chardin

 

Part Six (b):

Reader’s comment on Teilhard’s ‘silliness’

 

“Teilhard saw no clear dividing line between life and non-life.

Rather, all of reality coheres in a single reality”.

 

John Ryan Haule

 

 

 

 

 

Hans-Georg Lundahl writes in an e-mail (6 Jul 2018):

 

I agree Teilhard was .... I think "silly" is too good a word for it.

C S Lewis once seems to have said on Teilhard's "before life, there was pre-life" that before you light a lamp there is of course "pre-light" but sensible people call that darkness.

Have you included that reference yet?

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Damien Mackey replies: No, that is a new one for me, but thanks for alerting me to it.

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John Ryan Haule has written on this particular quirk of Teilhardianism (Jung in the 21st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science, Volume Two, p. 173):

 

The paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) developed probably the most comprehensive idea of a psychoid field in his book, The Phenomenon of Man (1959), an argument deeply rooted in evolutionary biology and inspired by his own mystical Catholicism—although it is an argument the Catholic Church still regards as “dangerous to the faith. Teilhard's argument resembles Jung's proposal that amoeba has something fundamental to tell us about the psychoid realm. Teilhard said, “By means of the cell, the molecular world 'appears in person,' touching, passing into, and disappearing in the higher constructions of life” (Teilhard de Chardin 1959: 81). Teilhard saw no clear dividing line between life and non-life. Rather, all of reality coheres in a single reality. What we have long called “life” and treated as an exceptional development unique to this blue planet has inevitable precursors: “a 'pre-life' [that extends] as far back before [life] as the eye can see” (Teilhard de Chardin 1959: 57). Teilhard draws our attention to a planetary stratum beginning with mud and extending up through water and the atmosphere, a several-mile-thick shell about the earth, filled with “ultramicro grains of protein”. He says, “If pre-life has already emerged in the atom, are not these myriads of large molecules just what we would expect?” (1959: 73).