---
title: "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin"
chunk: 10/14
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:34:12.127004+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Peter Medawar ===
In 1961, British immunologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar wrote a scornful review of The Phenomenon of Man for the journal Mind: "the greater part of it [...] is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. [...] Teilhard practiced an intellectually unexacting kind of science [...]. He has no grasp of what makes a logical argument or what makes for proof. He does not even preserve the common decencies of scientific writing, though his book is professedly a scientific treatise. [...] Teilhard habitually and systematically cheats with words [...], uses in metaphor words like energy, tension, force, impetus, and dimension as if they retained the weight and thrust of their special scientific usages. [...] It is the style that creates the illusion of content."
In 2014, Donald Wayne Viney evaluated Medawar's review and concluded that the case made against Teilhard was "remarkably thin, marred by misrepresentations and elementary philosophical blunders." These defects, Viney noted, were uncharacteristic of Medawar's other work.
In another response, John Allen Grim said when Teilhard "wrote The Phenomenon of Man … he was using science there in a very broad sense. What he was really looking for was to be actually more radically empirical than conventional science is. Conventional science leaves out so much that's really there, especially our own subjectivity and some of the other things that are qualitative and value laden that are going on in the world. That science … has abstracted from values, meaning, subjectivity, purpose, God, and talked only about physical causation. Teilhard knew this, because when he wrote his [science journal] papers, he didn't bring God, value and so forth into it. But when he wrote The Phenomenon, he was doing something different. But it's not against the spirit of science. It was to actually expand the empirical orientation of science to take into account things that science unfortunately leaves out, like consciousness, for example, which today, in a materialist worldview, doesn't even exist, and yet it's the most palpable experience that any of us has. So if you try to construct a worldview that leaves out something so vital and important as mind to subjectivity, then that's unempirical, that's irrelevant. What we need is a radically empirical approach to the world that includes within what he calls hyperphysics, the experience of consciousness and also the experiences of faith, religions.”

=== Richard Dawkins ===
Evolutionary biologist and a New Atheist Richard Dawkins called Medawar's review "devastating" and The Phenomenon of Man "the quintessence of bad poetic science".

=== Karl Stern ===
Karl Stern, the neurobiologist of the Montreal Neurological Institute, wrote: "It happens so rarely that science and wisdom are blended as they were in the person of Teilhard de Chardin."

=== George Gaylord Simpson ===
George Gaylord Simpson felt that if Teilhard were right, the lifework "of Huxley, Dobzhansky, and hundreds of others was not only wrong, but meaningless", and was mystified by their public support for him. He considered Teilhard a friend and his work in paleontology extensive and important, but expressed strongly adverse views of his contributions as scientific theorist and philosopher.

=== William G. Pollard ===
William G. Pollard, the physicist and founder of the prestigious Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies (and its director until 1974), praised Teilhard’s work as "A fascinating and powerful presentation of the amazing fact of the emergence of man in the unfolding drama of the cosmos."

=== John Barrow and Frank Tipler ===
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, both physicists and cosmologists, base much of their work on Teilhard and use some of his key terms such as the Omega point. However, Manuel Alfonseca, author of 50 books and 200 technical articles, said in an article in the quarterly Popular Science: "Barrow and Tipler have not understood Teilhard (apparently they have just read 'The Phenomenon of Man', at least this is the only work by Teilhard they mention). In fact, they have got everything backwards."

=== Wolfgang Smith ===
Wolfgang Smith, an American scientist versed in Catholic theology, devotes an entire book to the critique of Teilhard's doctrine, which he considers neither scientific (assertions without proofs), nor Catholic (personal innovations), nor metaphysical (the "Absolute Being" is not yet absolute), and of which the following elements can be noted (all the words in quotation marks are Teilhard's, quoted by Smith):

==== Evolution ====
Smith claims that for Teilhard, evolution is not only a scientific theory but an irrefutable truth "immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience"; it constitutes the foundation of his doctrine. Matter becomes spirit and humanity moves towards a super-humanity thanks to complexification (physico-chemical, then biological, then human), socialization, scientific research and technological and cerebral development; the explosion of the first atomic bomb is one of its milestones, while waiting for "the vitalization of matter by the creation of super-molecules, the remodeling of the human organism by means of hormones, control of heredity and sex by manipulation of genes and chromosomes [...]".

==== Matter and spirit ====
Teilhard maintains that the human spirit (which he identifies with the anima and not with the spiritus) originates in a matter which becomes more and more complex until it produces life, then consciousness, then the consciousness of being conscious, holding that the immaterial can emerge from the material. At the same time, he supports the idea of the presence of embryos of consciousness from the very genesis of the universe: "We are logically forced to assume the existence [...] of some sort of psyche" infinitely diffuse in the smallest particle.