QuestionsDoes history have a direction?The Omega point: evolution rises toward consciousness, and a personal center draws it
Does history have a direction?A divine plan

The Omega point: evolution rises toward consciousness, and a personal center draws it

The Omega point; the law of complexity-consciousness; the noosphere

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 1881 · 1955Jesuit and palaeontologist who reads in evolution a rise of consciousness toward a final point, Omega, which he identifies with Christ.
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What it claims

History, like the evolution it continues, has a meaning: it rises toward a completion in God, of which the Omega point is the center, and man, who may refuse, is invited to cooperate in it.

Why

Evolution rises toward more consciousness and converges; to avoid collapsing, it needs a personal center that draws it.

The same idea through history
Augustine of Hippo426Augustine reads history as the struggle of two cities, which will end only at the end of time. Teilhard keeps the idea of a meaning willed by God, but reads it in the evolution of the whole living world, from matter to thought.Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet1681Bossuet reads Providence in the succession of empires, around the history of Israel and the Church. Teilhard reads it in a rise of consciousness, which the science of his time allows him to describe.Nicolas de Condorcet1795Condorcet also thinks humanity progresses, but through reason alone, without God. Teilhard keeps the idea of progress and adds a center that draws it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin1955The version presented here. A Jesuit and palaeontologist, Teilhard wrote The Phenomenon of Man between 1938 and 1940. His order forbade him to publish it; the work appeared after his death, in 1955.
In short

"The Omega point: evolution rises toward consciousness, and a personal center draws it" is an argument by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, written 1938-1940, published 1955 (book IV, "Survival", and Epilogue), 1955) on the question "Does history have a direction?" (answer: a divine plan). Its claim: History, like the evolution it continues, has a meaning: it rises toward a completion in God, of which the Omega point is the center, and man, who may refuse, is invited to cooperate in it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, written 1938-1940, published 1955 (book IV, "Survival", and Epilogue)
Valid with an implicit premise

What if human history were only the continuation of a longer history, that of matter becoming alive, then thinking? Teilhard sees in evolution a rise: ever more complex wholes are also ever more conscious. With man, thought becomes able to reflect on itself; men, bound by speech and by science, form a thinking layer around the Earth, the noosphere, which tightens upon itself. For this convergence to have an end and not to collapse, he says, there must be a center: the Omega point, already existing, personal, which draws persons without dissolving them. He identifies it with God, and for the believer with Christ. Teilhard does not say the outcome is guaranteed: humanity may refuse.

P1Evolution is not without direction: over time, ever more complex wholes appear and, with their complexity, an ever richer psychism. Teilhard speaks of a law of complexity-consciousness.
P2With man, thought becomes reflective. Men, linked by language, exchange and science, form on Earth a thinking layer, the noosphere, which can no longer scatter on a finite planet and folds back upon itself: the process converges.
P3A convergence of consciences that does not destroy itself needs a center. This center, Omega, must already exist, be personal and be beyond the evolving world: it attracts more than it is built.
P4True union differentiates: the closer consciences come to this center, the more each becomes itself. An impersonal center would dissolve persons; only a personal center completes them.
P5 · implicit premiseA personal center, already existing, beyond the world, which draws history toward its completion, is what the tradition calls God acting in history. Its attraction is a providence.
So history, like the evolution it continues, has a meaning: it rises toward a completion in God, of which the Omega point is the center, and man, who may refuse, is invited to cooperate in it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where evolution rises toward consciousness, converges toward an existing personal center, and yet this center is not God and its attraction is not a providence: a center can be a cosmic fact without design.
Without the hidden premise P5, the premises describe a rise, a convergence and a necessary personal center. One must add that this center is God and that its attraction is a providence. Teilhard does this in the Epilogue and in his religious writings, outside the scientific reasoning he wants to keep in the rest of the book. His opponents contest the first premise (a direction in evolution) and this passage from science to theology.
Analogy. Raindrops on a slope gather into streams, then into a river. Teilhard sees something similar in life, with one difference: the stream does not go to the sea by the slope alone, the sea draws it. The closer one gets, the more each becomes himself. The Omega point is this sea, which already exists when the first stream flows.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

P
Peter Medawar 1961 · attacks premise 1

Medawar, a biologist and Nobel laureate, judges that the substance of the book is not scientific reasoning but a chain of formulas. A "law of complexity-consciousness" is drawn neither from palaeontology nor from evolutionary biology, and the book attributes to the facts conclusions they do not give. The work should not be taken for science.

a defender replies
Julian Huxley defender of the argument · 1959 · Huxley, introduction to the book
Summary: in his introduction to the English edition, Huxley, himself a biologist, welcomes Teilhard's effort to place man within evolution and to see it as a global process, directed toward more organisation and consciousness. He does not take over all of Teilhard's theology.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Huxley's introduction predates Medawar's critique (1959 and 1961). The two biologists judge the book in opposite ways. The disagreement is less about the facts than about whether a direction of evolution can be drawn from them.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Medawar: the book is not science and its law rests on no fact. Huxley: it offers an overall view of evolution, directed toward more consciousness. The basic disagreement remains: is a direction of evolution read in the facts, or projected onto them?
Stephen Jay Gould 1996 · attacks premise 1

Gould holds that evolution has no general direction toward more complexity or consciousness. The maximum complexity increases because life began very near a floor of simplicity, and chance makes it drift from there. Bacteria remain the most numerous. And if the film of life were replayed, there would be no reason for man to return.

a defender replies
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Simon Conway Morris defender of the argument · 2003
Summary: the palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris argues that the same solutions are found again and again from one lineage to another (eyes, for example, appeared independently many times). Evolution is constrained by what is possible, so replaying the film would give similar results, perhaps thinking beings.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Conway Morris defends evolutionary convergence, not the Omega point. Even if evolution produces comparable forms, this does not say it rises toward an end, still less that a center draws it. Biological convergence is a foothold for the idea of direction; there remains a step to providence.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Gould: evolution is a contingent drift, without progress. Conway Morris: constraints make life converge toward comparable solutions. The basic disagreement remains: is the contingent the essence of the history of life, or the necessary?
Walter Benjamin 1940 · attacks the conclusion

Benjamin describes an angel who, where we see a chain of events, sees a single catastrophe that piles ruin upon ruin. A storm drives him into the future, and this storm is what we call progress. To read history as a rise toward a completion is to forget the defeated and the ruins left behind.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Chardin in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Benjamin and Teilhard write at the same time and do not answer each other. Teilhard does not ignore failure: he writes that humanity may refuse. For him the ruins are the face of a process one sees only on the scale of millennia. Benjamin refuses this scale, which forgets those who paid.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Benjamin: history is a catastrophe, and progress is the storm that carries us off. Teilhard: the long scale of evolution draws a rise, despite failures. The basic disagreement remains: at what scale is the meaning of history to be read, and what is owed to the victims?