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.
