Thinking of Mystical Scientists

I see that today is Pierre Teihard de Chardin’s birthday. If my basic math is right he would have been one hundred and twenty-nine today.

This Jesuit paleontologist and theologian had a passing but important influence on me.

Somehow I enjoyed how in his youth he had something, not quite established, to do with the Piltdown man hoax. In my youth “everyone knew” he was mixed up in the fraud. Even another of those people I admire much, Stephen Jay Gould was pretty certain it was so. I gather people are much less sure these days. In fact he probably wasn’t involved at all, except as one of the throng of Charles Dawson’s dupes.

But, at the time I was aware of him, this was part of the myth…

Later Teihard would go on to become an important paleontologist involved deeply in the Peking Man discovery.

But he was more important to me as a theologian.

Early on he was in hot water with his superiors for his faulty understanding of original sin.

Obsessed with reconciling his scientific work with Christian faith, he came up with the interesting idea that evolution was in fact convergent, we were all evolving toward some mysterious moment of cosmic reconciliation.

All lovely.

Except I think that point isn’t in the future. It is part of what was, is, and is to be.

We are the stuff of each other. We are woven out of each other.

We are that mysterious reality which is both separate and one.

And the most interesting, to my heart, feature of the human condition is that we can know this as our visceral reality.

The difficulty is that we’re usually trapped in the separate consciousness. And we only glimpse the one consciousness sporadically.

It has been my observation pretty much everyone has had the glimpse, the taste. Once in a while it occurs in childhood. More often during adolescence. For some in adulthood.

Ideas of self and other fall away.

And we’re just here.

The catch then is that we pop back to that separate place and try to make some meaning of what happened.

Then we tell stories. And the stories are woven out of what we believe.

Teihard wove his stories out of Christianity and Evolutionary science as it was best understood in his day.

Bless him, he pointed as best he could.

And I count him an early guide for me on my own path.

Bless all the science mystics!