Re: Teilhard de Chardin - new documentary

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 29 May 2024 17:39:08 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
 

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip for focus]
 

Any religion with the concept of "dogma" built in will eventually bang
heads with science.

 
Really? The Catholic Church has loads of dogma; would you care to
identify where it bumps heads with science?
 

In the part you conveniently snipped there was a specific bumping of heads
I mentioned based on the very documentary in your OP:
“Teilhard got in hot water with Jesuits for his essay on original sin in
light of evolution.”
 
This essay by David Grumett elaborates:
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/pierre-teilhard-de-chardins-theological-trouble
 
“During the 1920s, Teilhard wrote an essay on how the doctrine of original
sin could be reconciled with the theory of evolution. The essay, meant for
private circulation, was passed on to church authorities in Rome, who saw
in the essay an alarming deviation from orthodoxy.”
 
“In his paper, Teilhard argued that traditional teachings about the fall of
Adam and Eve into sin were difficult to reconcile with science for two
reasons. First, fossils suggested that the human species emerged out of
several different evolutionary branches, not from a single pair of
ancestors. Second, an earthly paradise from which death, suffering, and
evil were absent was scientifically inconceivable, given that the tendency
toward physical disintegration is a condition of existence.”
 
And: “It was the fourth proposition that caused Teilhard great difficulty.
It read: “The whole human race takes its origin from one first parent,
Adam.” In a letter to his mentor, Teilhard wrote: “I am able to subscribe
to it in faith only with the implicit or explicit reserve that I regard the
proposition as subject to revisions (and, what is more, essential
revisions) of the kind to which belief in the eight days of creation, the
flood, etc., has been subjected; and I do not see how anyone could forbid
me this position.””
 
So Teilhard himself was bumping heads with authority based on his
interpretation of science.
 
And see:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-do-catholics-believe-about-adam-and-eve
 
I tried sending a reply like this earlier but it hasn’t shown up.

 
 
So the best you can come up with is from 100 years ago with a priest
falling out with his superior over a *theological* argument; a priest
whose ideas have since been praised by 3 consecutive popes.
 
Sounds like your Teilhard itch is playing up again.
 

Wait, what? This was no ordinary priest but Teilhard himself, you know…the
main topic of this thread you started. And my motivation to dig deeper came
from the documentary you recommended, which wasn’t horrible, not from
Slattery the novice scholar.

And that last link I provided

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-do-catholics-believe-about-adam-and-eve

Points to this (where science is butting heads with Catholic theology:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2011/08/11/can-theology-evolve/?sh=46b7932d48a9

It mentions both Jerry Coyne, who I have grown to despise, and George
Coyne, who I liked from Bill Maher’s *Religulous* though I might take issue
with some of his theistic evolutionary or cosmology views that lean more
heavily on the theistic. As for George Coyne the Forbes article says:

“Catholic apologists who point to Pope John Paul II’s 1996 address to the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences as evidence of the Church’s acceptance of
evolution often fail to notice that the late Pope completely passed over
the question of monogenism, and indeed never did discuss the problem that
genetics poses to the doctrine.”

“He was aware of the wider challenge, however, and in a letter he wrote to
the then head of the Vatican Observatory, Father George Coyne, (a letter
that should be much more widely circulated than it ever has been) he quite
bluntly stated that the Catholic Church faces a greater challenge from
science now than it has since the Middle Ages when theologians at the newly
founded universities rediscovered Aristotle and the great Muslim
philosophers of the 10th and 11th centuries.”

That gets a bit removed from the topic of Teilhard *per se*, especially my
focus on where eugenics fits with his evolutionary philosophy. George Coyne
might be regarded as an intellectual descendant of his though (eugenics
removed).