Evolution Is God's Method of Creation

Abstract

W ITH THE CONTROVERSY over evolution and still not resolved in some classrooms, it might be profitable for biology teachers to consider the concept of evolution developed by Teilhard de Chardin and set forth in his book The Phenomenon of Man (1959). Before evolution is condemned out-of-hand as an atheistic theory, serious consideration should be given to Teilhard's view of man and the cosmos. Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a French Jesuit priest and a distinguished paleontologist. His consuming passion was to reconcile the views of science and religion concerning the origin of the world and mankind. He felt that man in the Bible and man found in an archeologic excavation were one and the same. He could not separate the personal God of Israel and that God which he felt was the cosmic origin of the universe-his point Alpha. The Phenomenon of Man is not an easy book to read, and it suffers from translation from the French. As a consequence Teilhard's thinking is sometimes rejected simply because it is not properly understood. An excellent primer to Phenomenon and to Teilhard has been written by Joseph Kopp (1964). After making a careful, serious study of Phenomenon for several years worked out an outline of Teilhard's ideas and a set of visuals for use with an overhead projector. find this is a successful means of communicating Teilhard's thesis on evolution to students. The students may not always accept Teilhard's teaching, but at least they understand a theory that may very well be a milestone in evolutionary biology. At the NABT convention in San Francisco, in October 1972, Theodosius Dobzhansky, addressing a capacity audience of teachers, said, I believe with the great Teilhard de Chardin that evolution is God's method of creation (Dobzhansky 1973).