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Posted by father john george  on November 7, 2009, 6:16 pm
Wolfgang Smith, Teilhardism and the New Religion
ISBN 0895553155 (Tan Books: Rockford, Illinois, 1988), 250 pp. softbound.
reviewed by John F. McCarthy
This book is, as it claims, a thorough analysis and refutation of the teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Composed by a physicist and mathematician who has also studied deeply into philosophy and theology, it brings to bear upon Teilhard's writings the exacting scrutiny of a scientist and the comprehensive overview of an educated believer.
Smith has read almost all of the available published works of Teilhard. He quotes from them with precision as he analyzes their content. For instance, as he tells us early on (14) that "for Teilhard, not only is evolution a fact: it is the all-important fact," he quotes here and elsewhere from Teilhard to prove his observation. In the telling, Teilhard's thoughts become much better organized by Smith than they ever were in Teilhard's own mind, and, as their content is gradually presented and weighed, one clearly sees their true place both in the reality of Smith's framework and in the fantasy of Teilhard's. Whoever wants a concise idea of what de Chardin really said and of what it really means can do no better than to read Smith's masterful analysis of Teilhard's vision of the world.
Dr. Smith is, among other things, an expert on geometrical spaces. It is intriguing to witness how he handles, in mathematical terms, the unscientific geometrical notions in Teilhard's view of the cosmos: that Heaven is neither 'above' nor 'within,' but ahead of us in time (34); that "it is the nature of Matter, when raised corpuscularly to a very high degree of complexity, to become centered and interiorized" (49); that the 'Omega Point' is the ultimate term of cosmogenesis and coincides in reality with Christ (80); that in the evolving universe God is not conceivable (either structurally or dynamically) except insofar as he coincides with ... the center of convergence of cosmogenesis, ... a God who is functionally and totally 'Omega'" (118); that "creation, incarnation and redemption are not facts which can be localized [Teilhard's emphasis] at a given point of time and space" (123).
When Smith tells us (19) that there is "no evidence at all" for the transformist hypothesis in which Teilhard so firmly believed, he is speaking as a scientist and on the basis of the most up-to-date scientific data. And he shows us (22-23) that the transformist dream is based on faith alone, as de Chardin admitted and as recent discoveries in biology are demonstrating ever more clearly.
Teilhard's aim was to found a new Christianity (23). By visualizing Heaven as a development that is neither above us nor within us but only ahead of us in time, Teilhard was able to transpose and falsify virtually every traditional Christian conception, beginning with the idea of man (34-35). As a scientist, Smith finds that Teilhard speaks only in metaphors: "take away the metaphors and there is no theory left. What is lacking in Teilhard's doctrine are scientific definitions, scientific concepts" (58).
Thus, to Teilhard the pseudoscientist, the notions of creation and development, while they are separated in Scholastic thought, "are seen to be constantly fused, combined together" (Christianity and Evolution, 23). As a scientist and mathematician, Smith shows this reflection of Teilhard to be unscientific. "Is it possible to conceive of a single, omnipresent Point? Now, as every mathematician will readily understand, it is not only possible, but quite easy to do so; what is needed (if we may be excused for the use of technical jargon) is a 'vertical dimension,' orthogonal to space-time, and an extended metric which is degenerate in that vertical direction" (72, 97).
Smith finds that Teilhard's notion of a gravitationally convergent universe is scientifically obsolete (81); it contradicts the law of entropy (84). Teilhard's notion of Christ as standing at the Omega Point is a misunderstanding of velocity vectors (95-96). Teilhard's notion of history, based on his unscientific "Law of Complexity," "has in effect cut down our field of vision to dimensions of smallness never before attained: to a single one-dimensional continuum, so to speak, coordinatized by a postulated 'parameter of complexity.'" The difficulty is that Teilhard presents as mathematical and scientific what is not a mathematical or scientific notion of 'complexity': "in mathematical parlance, it is not a variable taking values in an ordered set" (167-168).
From the start, Teilhard's celebrated Omega Point "was nothing more than a quasi-theological notion, masquerading in scientific dress" (109). Teilhard rather openly admitted that he was preaching a form of pantheism (see, for example, Christianity and Evolution, 171), and Smith shows (111-112) that his theory could be nothing else. Teilhard insisted that God can be defined only as a "Center of centers" (Human Energy, 168), and Smith points out (116) that "after all, a center (whether of centers or of anything else) cannot be conceived apart from the system whose center it is."
It is illuminating to hear from Wolfgang Smith the physicist what is wrong with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's notion of matter, and to hear from Wolfgang Smith the mathematician what is wrong with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's notion of the Omega Point and how Teilhard cleverly but falsely shifted the axis of spiritual contemplation from the 'above' to the 'ahead' (70). We go on to discover that for Teilhard, not only does God, the "center of convergence of cosmogenesis," metamorphize the world, but the world also inevitably and to the same degree "endomorphizes" God. "At this point the Teilhardian God ceased to be simply 'the Evolver,' and became at least in part a product or resultant of the evolutive process" (107). Ultimately, for Teilhard, "it is Christ who is saved by Evolution" (118, quoting The Heart of the Matter, 92). Deep down, Teilhard's faith was only in this world: "If as a result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness) - that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe" (Smith, 129, quoting Christianity and Evolution, 99).
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