---
title: "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin"
chunk: 8/14
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"
---

Hardly anyone else has tried to bring together the knowledge of Christ and the idea of evolution as the scientist (paleontologist) and theologian Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., has done. ...  His fascinating vision ... has represented a great hope, the hope that faith in Christ and a scientific approach to the world can be brought together. ...  These brief references to Teilhard cannot do justice to his efforts. The fascination which Teilhard de Chardin exercised for an entire generation stemmed from his radical manner of looking at science and Christian faith together.
In July 2009, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said, "By now, no one would dream of saying that [Teilhard] is a heterodox author who shouldn't be studied."
Pope Francis refers to Teilhard's eschatological contribution in his encyclical Laudato si'.
The philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand criticized severely the work of Teilhard. According to Hildebrand, in a conversation after a lecture by Teilhard: "He (Teilhard) ignored completely the decisive difference between nature and supernature. After a lively discussion in which I ventured a criticism of his ideas, I had an opportunity to speak to Teilhard privately. When our talk touched on St. Augustine, he exclaimed violently: 'Don't mention that unfortunate man; he spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural.'" Von Hildebrand writes that Teilhardism is incompatible with Christianity, substitutes efficiency for sanctity, dehumanizes man, and describes love as merely cosmic energy.

== Evaluations by scientists ==

=== Julian Huxley ===
Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist, in the preface to the 1955 edition of The Phenomenon of Man, praised the thought of Teilhard de Chardin for looking at the way in which human development needs to be examined within a larger integrated universal sense of evolution, though admitting he could not follow Teilhard all the way. In the publication Encounter, Huxley wrote: "The force and purity of Teilhard's thought and expression ... has given the world a picture not only of rare clarity but pregnant with compelling conclusions."

=== Theodosius Dobzhansky ===
Theodosius Dobzhansky, writing in 1973, drew upon Teilhard's insistence that evolutionary theory provides the core of how man understands his relationship to nature, calling him "one of the great thinkers of our age". Dobzhansky was renowned as the president of four prestigious scientific associations: the Genetics Society of America, the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Zoologists. He also called Teilhard "one of the greatest intellects of our time."

=== Daniel Dennett ===
Daniel Dennett claimed "it has become clear to the point of unanimity among scientists that Teilhard offered nothing serious in the way of an alternative to orthodoxy; the ideas that were peculiarly his were confused, and the rest was just bombastic redescription of orthodoxy."

=== David Sloan Wilson ===
In 2019, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson praised Teilhard's book The Phenomenon of Man as  "scientifically prophetic in many ways", and considers his own work as an updated version of it, commenting that "[m]odern evolutionary theory shows that what Teilhard meant by the Omega Point is achievable in the foreseeable future."

=== Robert Francoeur ===
Robert Francoeur (1931-2012), the American biologist, said the Phenomenon of Man "will be one of the few books that will be remembered after the dust of the century has settled on many of its companions."