The Philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin and the Dilemma of AI

 

by Nancy Corson Carter, Ph.D.

A friend recently surprised me with a small stack of books by Teilhard de Chardin. I was puzzled, but pleased nonetheless. I’d read one of them, The Phenomenon of Man, probably his best-known work, during a 1965 European study tour. The book intrigued me; I couldn’t forget it. I’ve had various reasons to return to his work from time to time during my teaching career, especially on matters of earth and spirit.

However, only a few weeks after the books' arrival, I was jolted into an unexpected need for de Chardin’s wisdom. The “jolt” came with weeks of headlines like these from The New York Times (9/13/26): “The AI Safety Experts Can’t Sleep, and Neither Should You,” and “Is AI Too Big to Slow Down?” (both from 9/15/26). A few days later, the Times Editorial Board published a full-page piece, “How to Rein in an Existential Threat” (9/20/26).

 In July, more than 1,300 employees from leading AI companies signed an open letter voicing concerns that AI is developing faster than humans’ ability to understand, oversee, or control it. There have been dire predictions about its potentially deadly effects on human life in the near future. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate known as the “Godfather of AI,” issued an ominous warning to lawmakers: “Congress may have only one year to act,” Hinton told Senate and House lawmakers behind closed doors. “Maybe a year, but not much more is left to implement safeguards on artificial intelligence before it loses control of it.”

Obviously, we’re on the cusp of AI no longer being controlled by humans; it’s close to becoming a tool we thought we controlled, but instead it is able, through “recursive self-improvement,” to become an independent species. This is what has come to be known as “the Singularity,” the point at which technological development reproduces itself uncontrollably and irreversibly, almost inevitably dominating human civilization.

My sense is that there are too many opportunities for AI entities to “renegade” and cause real danger to our world. I know that AI has many good points and has already provided many tools for organization and information. I appreciate having used it to access materials I’ve used in this very piece, but warnings from its originators tell us that it poses dangers that could be catastrophic if we do not take effective steps to establish global controls. Unfortunately, AI offers easy openings for escalating lawlessness and other possible evils if we do not take definite steps to control it. It appears to provide access to technologies that competing world powers, misunderstanding the threats to us all, want to possess without sharing.

As I write this piece to meet an October deadline, the headlines continue to elaborate on the state of AI in our world. For example, “U.S. Seeks Relevance on AI as U.S. and China Race Ahead” (September 22 NYTimes, A9) suggests there’s no sense that either superpower intends to slow down. The same article also elaborates on the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s largely ignored hopes for international cooperation on AI, as well as on climate change and deepening global inequality. Furthermore, NYTimes, September 26 B1, reported that “Google is sending an experimental satellite into orbit with enough computing power to answer AI queries from space.”

  In this piece, I consider how Teilhard de Chardin’s life and work exemplify the following statement by Samuel Wells in the March 2024 issue of the National Catholic Reporter: “Some technological developments are healthy, some less healthy. The point is, the way we know whether they’re healthy is the extent to which they facilitate faith, hope, and love.  So AI is testing the church as to whether it truly believes that faith, hope, and love are what we’re made for.  What Christians need to assert and embody and enrich is the quality of their relationships with God, one another, and the creation. AI is showing us the difference between artificial love and real love.” 

When the EARTH planning team met in September 2026, we decided to focus our next issue on AI The chance arrival of the Teilhard texts soon after gave me an idea. I felt we might benefit from exploring Teilhard de Chardin’s deep wisdom about science and faith, both of which were so central to this topic for us. So I trusted this intuition and began exploring it.

Some may ask, “Who IS Teilhard de Chardin?”

In short:  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest who sought to integrate modern evolutionary science with Christian spirituality.   More fully:  He was ordained a priest in 1911 and served as a stretcher-bearer in the French Army during WWI, earning high military honors for bravery. He earned a Sorbonne doctorate in geology and spent decades as a paleontologist conducting fieldwork in China, where he was a co-discoverer of the famous 1929 Peking Man skull (Sinanthropus Pekinensis). Also a brilliant teacher and writer in Europe and later in Africa, he held progressive views on evolution and original sin that challenged traditional Church dogma. As a result, his Jesuit superiors took the extreme step of banning him from publishing his philosophical writings and from teaching theology during his lifetime.

Still a dedicated priest, he continued the work he felt called to: the unification of science and religion. He spent his last years in exile in the US, in NYC. He had bequeathed his writings to a friend to avoid Church jurisdiction, and they were all published soon after his death, including The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, two of his most famous works. 

I learned from AI that Teilhard was introduced to early computers in 1950 and became fascinated by the idea of machines capable of processing human thought. Today, his philosophy is widely considered prophetic regarding the internet, global networks, and Artificial Intelligence.

Long before computers were a fixture of daily life, Teilhard argued that evolution did not end with biological humans. Instead, he believed human consciousness was on an unstoppable path toward a vast, interconnected global mind. Furthermore, his bold synthesis of science and faith later earned appreciation from prominent theologians and modern popes for anticipating holistic views on ecology, human unity, and cosmic spirituality. For example, Pope Francis made history by explicitly citing Teilhard in a papal encyclical—his 2015 ecological letter, Laudato si', noting his contribution to understanding the universe’s ultimate destination.

Eric Steinhart, a leader among “transhumanists,” also credited Teilhard as one of the first to envision the Internet. Steinhart declares in his article “Teilhard de Chardin & Transhumanism” that transhumanists advocate the ethical use of technology for human enhancement, but they have problems with Teilhard’s Omega Point Theory, which is deeply Christian.

So here is what I hope is a clear outline of several basic terms in Teilhard’s thinking,  

The Omega Point and the Noosphere:

In the Omega Point, Teilhard conceptualizes the growth of the universe as evolving through increasing complexity and consciousness toward its culmination in a final spiritual unity.  Before that could be achieved, however, he understood three stages of life on Earth:

geosphere (inanimate matter)

 biosphere (botanical life)

His training as a paleontologist and his experiences in the discovery and interpretation of Peking Man taught him about stages 1 and 2. Then, conceiving of human development as both a logical and a theological outgrowth of his training and experience, he arrived at the third stage, which he named the “Noosphere.” 

Noosphere, the ultimate and final destination of evolution. He predicted that human evolution would shift from biological change to the creation of a global web of interconnected thought and consciousness. It emerged from evolutionary complexity and links all human minds through communication, reflection, and social networks (another anticipation of the internet?).

Finally, Teilhard conceived the Omega Point as the ultimate destination of evolution.  Teilhard conceptualized it as the supreme point of maximum complexity and consciousness, where the universe becomes fully unified. Theologically, he identified this ultimate point of spiritual convergence as the cosmic Christ.

An AI Overview of comparisons and differences between “Technocentric” and “Teilhardian” visions:

The comparison between the technocentric vision of AI(often associated with transhumanism, dataism, and the technological singularity) and the Teilhardian vision (developed by Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) centers on evolutionary convergence.

While both visions predict that intelligence and consciousness will eventually unify into a global network (the technocentric "Global Brain" or the Singularity vs. Teilhard’s Noosphere), theologians and scholars raise profound criticisms when the two are equated.

The core theological criticisms highlight the irreconcilable differences between a purely materialist, technology-driven future and a grace-filled, Christocentric destiny. 

Summary of Differences

Theological Category	Technocentric Vision	Teilhardian Vision
Ultimate Goal	The Singularity (Digital Hive Mind)	The Omega Point (The Cosmic Christ)
Primary Driver	Human technology and computation	Divine Love and Grace
Human Personhood	Tends toward absorption/dissolution into data	Preserved and fulfilled through relationship
View of Death	A technical problem to be solved	A threshold of transformation through Christ

 

In further comparison, AI offers this helpful comparison of the Omega Point and the Technological Singularity.  “While both describe a looming, epochal flashpoint where human intelligence converges with something far greater, they stem from funda

The core distinction is simple: the Singularity is an exponential explosion of processing power and intelligence, whereas the Omega Point is a teleological convergence of love and consciousness, sometimes called “a species-wide enlightenment.”

Obviously, AI can be a helpmate as well as a contender for our minds’ and spirits’ understanding of our purpose on a rapidly changing Earth. As we dedicate ourselves to being keepers of the precious gifts of the natural world and of our understanding of its being and belonging to the Creator/Redeemer/Sustainer we worship, how may we live lives in understanding of Christianity as what he called “nothing more nor less than a ‘phylum of love’ within nature” (see Teilhard’s The Divine Milieu, p. 15)?

There is so much in Teilhard’s writing that urges us onward in love. In his “Pensées” in The Hymn of the Universe (1961, English, p. 145), he writes:

Only love can bring individual beings to their perfect completion as individuals by uniting them with one another, because only love takes possession of them and unites them by what lies deepest within them. Humanity, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, of the one with the many: all these are regarded as utopian fantasies, yet they are biologically necessary; and if we would see them made flesh in the world, what more need we do than imagine our power to love growing and broadening till it can embrace the totality of men and of the earth? 

On the dedication page of Building the Earth (originally published in French as L'Avenir de l'homme), his words appear with his signature copied below. In recent weeks, the U.N. met but failed to address AI forthrightly. In a high-level meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and U.S. President Trump in Washington, D.C., neither was willing to give up the race for “leadership” in AI Unfortunately, there is currently a strong reluctance to accept the prophecy Teilhard made much earlier:

The Age of Nations is past.

         The task before us now,

 if we would not perish,

            is to build the earth.

So I ask myself, my fellow Christians, and all who truly care for the earth, in the spirit of love, to work and pray for understanding. How can we build on Teilhard’s powerful example of loving faithfulness to follow a path of healing and building the earth in our own time before it is too late? 

Rather than lament the inadequacy of my own answers to this question, I am heartened to remember Teilhard’s magnificent “Mass on the Earth,” written first (of many reiterations in his lifetime) when he found himself without his “mass kit” during a scientific expedition in China’s Ordos Desert. This was on the feast of the Transfiguration, a feast for which he had a special love. In the “Offering” of the mass, undeterred by his great humility and wonder at God’s presence in the brilliance of the just-rising sun, he wrote (in Hymn of the Universe) a fitting conclusion to this writing:

“Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day.                                                                                 

This bread, our toil, is of itself, I know, but an immense fragmentation; this wine, our pain, no more, I know, than a draught that dissolves. Yet in the very depths of this formless mass you have implanted—and this I am sure of, for I sense it—a desire, irresistible, hallowing, which makes us cry out, believer and unbeliever alike: ‘Lord, make us one’.”

                                                 # # # # #

(In late September 2026, I’ve been encouraging friends and neighbors to contact their Representatives to support the “AI Kill Switch Act,” H.R. 9917, which remains in the House committee process after a related Senate push was blocked. Hopefully, Congress will address it when it reconvenes on November 9. Note: 5calls.org is very helpful.)                                              

Teilhard de Chardin’s Books primarily consulted:     

The Phenomenon of Man, first published in English in 1959 by Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., London and Harper & Row, Pubs. Incorporated

The Divine Milieu, English translation copyright 1960 by Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., London and Harper & Row, Pubs. Incorporated

Hymn of the Universe, copyright 1965 in the English Translation by Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd. London and Harper & Row Inc., New York.

Building the Earth, Dimension Books, Wilkes-Barre, Pa. 1965; first American edition, originally published by Editions du Seuil (Paris). This translation was made by Noël Lindsay, whose work was officially approved by the Assoc. of Friends of Teilhard de Chardin.

Nancy Corson Carter, professor emerita of humanities at Eckerd College, has published THREE poetry books, Dragon Poems The Sourdough Dream Kit, and A Green Bough: Poems for Renewal (most recent) and three poetry chapbooks. Some of her poems, drawings, and photos appear in her nonfiction book, Martha, Mary, and Jesus: Weaving Action and Contemplation in Daily Life, and in her memoir, The Never-Quite-Ending War: a WWII GI Daughter's Stories.