by Professor Walter J. Veith, PhD: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a French Jesuit priest and scientist. He studied and practiced paleontology, theology, and philosophy.
Teilhard was also a supporter of a one-world government. Some call him “The Father of the New Age.”i
According to one biographer, Teilhard “spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution. In this endeavor he became absolutely enthralled with the possibilities for humankind, which he saw as heading for an exciting convergence of systems, an ‘Omega point’ where the coalescence of consciousness will lead us to a new state of peace and planetary unity.”
This meshing of evolution and religion inevitably resulted in the New Age thinking that Teilhard promoted throughout his life.
Here are some of the key phrases Teilhard developed:
The Omega Point
One of Teilhard’s most widespread ideas is the Omega Point. According to Teilhard, the Omega Point is a level of consciousness and unity that the whole universe is evolving towards. To him the Omega is a personal, transcendent being that is not constrained by time or space. Teilhard writes this in his book On Love and Happiness:
The world would not function if there did not exist, somewhere ahead in time and space, “a cosmic point Omega” of total synthesis.
Christ Consciousness
Along the same lines as the Omega Point is Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of Christ consciousness:
Christ Consciousness is the growing human recognition and blending of the human evolutionary (or ego) mind with the Divine Mind and the Divine Personality that is the source of human happiness and fulfillment.
Super-humanity
According to Teilhard, humanity is evolving towards complete unity into a single organism, a completely unanimous super-humanity:
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth.
In On Love and Happiness, Teilhard writes this:
…we human beings are already forming but one single body…our thoughts are tending more and more to function like the cells of one and the same brain. This must inevitably mean that as the transformation follows its natural line of progress we can foresee the time when men will understand what it is, animated by one single heart, to be united together in wanting, hoping for, and loving the same things at the same time.
The mankind of tomorrow is emerging from the mists of the future, and we can actually see it taking shape: a “super-mankind,” much more conscious, much more powerful, and much more unanimous than our own…what life ultimately calls upon us to do in order that we may be, is to incorporate ourselves into, and to subordinate ourselves to, an organic totality of which, cosmically speaking, we are no more than conscious particles.
Noosphere
Teilhard used the term “noosphere” to refer to his idea of the place where all this mental harmony and spiritual unity will occur. Tom Butler-Bowden describes the noosphere as the “mental counterpart” to the biosphere, or the “invisible layer of thought around the earth that is the sum total of humankind’s mental and spiritual states, all culture, love and knowledge.
