[extropy-chat] Transhumanism: Teilhard de Chardin - Truth or Dare

[Damien Broderick]

----- Original Message -----
From: <natashavita at earthlink.net>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 2:49 PM

> One such provoking and erudite thinker is Teilhard de Chardin.

I, for one, was moved by his Omega Point notion in the early 1960s, when I
was still a fervent if unorthodox Catholic. I must have been one of the
first people to read THE PHENOMENON OF MAN in English. However...

>  (de Chardin)

[BTW, that's NOT his name, as the other citations show. It's properly
shortened to Teilhard, not to de Chardin or Chardin.]

> "It is perhaps not surprising that a leading advocate of Darwinism,
Stephen
> Jay Gould, has gone to work on Teilhard. Writing vehemently and
> dogmatically, like the guardian of an established religion, Gould asserts
> that Teilhard's whole enterprise is illegitimate: Teilhard's essential
> insights are incompatible with science.

`Guardian of established religion' my foot. Gould, and more impressively
still Sir Peter Medawar, showed why Teilhard's teleological and God-dragged
model of evolution is just plain incompatible with random mutation and
natural selection. It's a form of divine Lamarckism. It *could* have been
true, in some other universe; it might even be true to some extent in a
Tiplerian Omega Point universe. But it doesn't jibe with what science has
learned to date about how evolution works.

> I don't think we need [religious dogma].  I think we need more love and
understanding,
> story-telling, poetry, imagination, laughter, fun and companionship, not
> religious mysticism?

Right on, as we said back then, or a decade later. :)

Damien Broderick