Oct. 17, 2025
Odyssey Toward Omega:
Embedded Hope
Both science and religion track the mystery of the world, why it is and why it is the way it is. For centuries they honored each other’s tools and beliefs, but as science increasingly distinguished itself from cosmological myth, the tension could not hold. The chasm opened in the church’s condemnation of Galileo widened with science’s turn to materialism. Over recent decades, some from both sides have tried to bridge it, yet each favored their grounding discipline. But one man, formed in the arms of both and way ahead of his time, left a legacy of the hope engendered when faith and science are held in one hand.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin grew up in the mountainous landscape of Auvergne in France at the end of the 19th century. He drank deeply of both his father’s naturalist delight and his mother’s deep Roman Catholic spirituality; he later wrote that he could not remember a time in his life when he did not feel the presence of the divine in each bit of nature – river and mountain, pebble and flower. So elemental was this experience that he was startled upon learning that his schoolmates were unaware of it.
And he would never lose it. When his Jesuit novice master encouraged Teilhard’s interest in the sciences as a legitimate path to God, his course was set. Though he would study
broadly in chemistry and physics as well as literature and philosophy, it was the passion for geology kindled by his father that would lead Teilhard to the evolutionary theory that would give birth to a transforming vision of faith.
Teilhard’s Jesuit superiors recognized his intellectual gifts soon after his entrance into the order at the age of 18; they supported his coursework across the spectrum of physical sciences and encouraged him in teaching and research. They were less pleased when Teilhard began to focus in the field of paleontology and discovered the evidence of evolving life that could not be denied. But it was his singular intuition of the union of the ongoing unfolding of creation with the action of the divine that would beget attempts of first his order and then of the church to shut him down.
During his life, Teilhard was well known and richly praised as a scientist. With more than two hundred scholarly articles and several academic prizes to his credit, alongside his membership in numerous scientific expeditions to Asia and Africa, his credibility and integrity could not be doubted. The rigorous Jesuit religious formation put his commitment to his faith beyond question. Teilhard’s integrity on both fronts put church censors in a tough spot. Though they employed delayed responses and exile to foreign placements instead of outright condemnation, the message was clear. Teilhard’s ideas were dangerous to their authority.
Front Lines of Being
As early as his thirties, Teilhard began to put his synthesis of science and theology on paper. So strongly did his insights grip him that his first writings were scribbled in moments between skirmishes during his service as a stretcher bearer on the front lines of World War I. Originally shared only with a cousin and a few close friends, the excitement they stirred in these early readers could not be contained; the papers were leaked to others and eventually made their way to a Jesuit theologian, and the trouble began.
It is not surprising that readers found his notions compelling. Throughout a complexity that can be intimidating upon first encounter, Teilhard’s cosmology nevertheless sings with wholeness and hope. Blowing open both ends of the traditional conception of creation, Teilhard’s God neither chooses to create nor requires creation’s final redemption. Creation, says Teilhard, 𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘎𝘰𝘥’𝘴 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦; not only 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 God create, but God must 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 and 𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦. And the indisputable fossil record proclaimed to Teilhard 𝘩𝘰𝘸 God creates.
In a struggle with the limitations of language that mirrors mystics everywhere, Teilhard calls this God a “potency,” a “dominant causality,” a “participated being.” This is a God who will never be proven by science because there will never be any discontinuity between divine operation and the physical laws which science discerns. But it is also a God who is evinced in what science does discern – the spirit-driven evolution of life toward complexity, toward more life and more diverse life, toward greater and more intense life.
Thus creation yearns not for restoration to a primal perfection, but strains always toward its increase. And it is within this reoriented universe that Teilhard finds a new role for the Christ. The Christ is no longer to be associated with the single person of Jesus or even with the opening to transformation attributed to him. The Christ is for Teilhard the direction, the animation, of the creation that is unfolding. All of life is incarnational, and all of life carries the Christ. Teilhard claims for Jesus simply the first clear and self-conscious manifestation of its presence, one poised to send an embryonic humanity toward the confluence of the infinite rivers of life where all is unified in the function of love.
For all is already organically connected within the Being of God. The task is to recognize it and to consciously participate in a “conspiracy of love” that drives toward culmination in the divine. In a truly courageous leap, Teilhard postulates for the coming stage in humanity’s evolution a collective consciousness that will encompass all human knowing within the divine, a global network of interrelated minds that he termed the 𝘯𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦. From the geosphere of inanimate life to the biosphere of living things, the noosphere signifies the next step in the progressive awakening of universal consciousness. And as surely as evolution did not stop at the level of rocks or plants, the noosphere represents too just the next stage of living phenomena moving toward a point of cosmic spiritual convergence that he named the Omega Point. Yet even this Omega Point belies its name in its eternal transformation; its telos is beyond our imagining.
It is a glorious vision, with the power to lift us from our lethargy and despair. It envisages other cosmic complexes and other epochs of this one within a God of infinite possibility. Human intuition is prized in the discernment of its most creative contributions; miracles are simply the early breaking through of innate and emerging wholeness.
But alas, the vista that was eagerly engaged by spiritual seekers was too much for the professionals. Despite his firm grounding in both science and religion, theologians and scientists alike rejected Teilhard’s paradigm. Each from within its defined camp accused him of playing fast and loose with received knowledge. But perhaps more damning and deflating, both called out what they perceived as his unjustified optimism.
Front Rank of Adventure
It is remarkable, really, that he managed to hold on to it, that optimism. Teilhard was not naïve. He lived through two world wars; he witnessed daily destruction and suffering on the front lines of the first one. Yet his front-row seat to violence did nothing to shake his absolute faith in a larger process that redeems all suffering. Rather, these trials aligned for him with the travail in all of nature and of Jesus himself as an inevitable facet of a universe finding its way.
Was Teilhard’s confidence in the future justifiable? Each human heart must discern that for itself. But I think we must not too readily dismiss Teilhard as ingenuous; his portrait of creation is not all rosy. This project of becoming is risky. A commitment to create, even God’s, engenders freedom in the created if it is to be truly alive. With no prescribed destination, creation will appear confused and untidy, marked by the appearance of failure and evil, all as the inevitable fallout of a learning universe, says Teilhard. And though it has always been so, with the advance of consciousness and the shift from natural selection to human agency, the stakes are heightened and the potential for real damage multiplied. Yet even within clear-eyed confrontation with suffering, Teilhard would repeatedly name the divine enterprise an “adventure.”
Humanity currently stands as the front rank of the adventure of evolution. It will only advance – to the degree it will advance – because of us. And though Teilhard knew the impossibility of prescribing particular actions for this convergent becoming, he was both firm and eloquent in his warning of the many ways we may prevent it. And if they were staring him in the face in the midst of war, they are arguably more potent today.
Teilhard states it succinctly: “individualism opposes evolution.” Any meaningful and lasting progress in the conspiracy of love will only happen in the interdependent becoming of each participant in the whole. All being is relational, and it is only in taking steps toward one another that the whole will push forward. And that is perhaps the hardest pill for the twenty-first century person to swallow: that the distinctive attributes and gifts of which we are so proud, which we have labored so hard to cultivate, are worth nothing outside of the profound union to which we are called.
How can this be good news in these days when individuation is promoted as the hallmark of a healthy psyche? Teilhard would not hesitate to acknowledge that one must know and make the most of the gifts one will offer to the creative becoming of the world. Yet he is adamant that it is only in their contribution to the whole that our unique gifts can sing. From the fulfillment of finding their proper place in the divine creative process, each will experience the “super-personalization” of knowing its essential value.
But we resist. We resist believing in what we cannot yet see, and this recalcitrance Teilhard names our original sin. Our imagination fails us; the adventure is aborted. But does this perhaps name what Teilhard’s superiors, what church officials feared? Right out of the gate, Teilhard’s thought challenges: Can we imagine the kind of world, the kind of God, the kind of evolution he paints? Once imagined, can we believe in it? And can we go on from there to submit to the suffering of not just preaching the new that God will do, but in taking up the responsibility for being the new?
The stakes around such imagination are higher than ever in our day. For Teilhard, there is a momentum in the enterprise of divine/human evolution, but it is not failproof. There is one thing, he says, that can destroy that momentum: “the fatal shock of a great disillusionment.” A disillusionment of which we now stand on the precipice.
Creation’s momentum requires us, and Teilhard over and over invokes the “zest for living” through which that driving force is fed. This is the spiritual energy that animates every element of creation, from particle to person. In this immersion in the adventure, suffering is welcomed as well as joy, setbacks as well as breakthroughs. But we don’t have forever; we dare not wait for it, but must cultivate it in ourselves and encourage it in others as we consciously join the odyssey of evolution that the universe has always been.
In the words of Teilhard scholar John F. Haught, “each of us is part of an immense cosmic drama of transformation.” It’s a lofty framing of our existential moment. But he also cautions, “Without a horizon of expectation we succumb to the ‘sweet decay’ of hopeless lethargy.” I can think of no more cogent framing of our present moment.
In a word of great prescience, Teilhard once suggested that the decisive move in the direction of the evolution toward divine convergence, an overdue overcoming of fear and resistance, might finally be predicated on a looming threat to human survival. It was his hope that by such time, humanity’s initiation into the conspiracy toward Omega might be sufficient to recognize “the immensity of the universe and the narrowness of their prison,” and to take the step into the 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘺 human exercise of choice for liberty and responsibility.
Process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr., another prophet of divine/human potential, when asked about his outlook for the future of the world, replied, “I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful.” I suspect Teilhard might have said something similar. It is not easy, nor perhaps even wise, to try to shore up optimism when anxiety and lethargy are the only apparent responses to the decay of a life-affirming faith. But how might that change – how might 𝘸𝘦 change – if we embraced the God that Teilhard knew from before he had memories, the God that animated even the stone he held in his hand? The God whose very being is the hope borne by the potential embedded in the rise of the new.
All our attempts to imagine the Great Mystery behind life must finally give way to the living of it in some sort of faith in its benevolence, its generosity, its hope. And if we cannot finally know how well Teilhard’s intuition limned that Mystery and its promise, his invitation nonetheless arrives from his conviction and courage to beckon us beyond the dismal prospects of a view defined by the present alone. The Church’s fear of that summons shut down publication of Teilhard’s works until after his death, but when finally unleashed, he found a readership that continues to grow with each generation of seekers. There is hope for us yet.
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