Catholic Theologian John F. Haught on the Importance of Evolution
As Pope Francis unveiled his very important plea to save the planet over the last few weeks, here is another Catholic who also has a positive message – that humanity is still evolving and that we all need to do our part. Dr. John F. Haught, Distinguished professor of Theology at Georgetown University spoke about that imperative in What is Enlightenment magazine some ten years ago. His words are as relevant as ever:
Q: French Priest and Mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s suggested that evolution is ongoing as opposed to the idea that we have come to an endpoint in the evolution of human beings.
A: Because there are fourteen billion years that preceded our emergence in this universe, we are too likely to say, “Okay, finally nature has reached its goal in producing us.” But there’s no reason for us to think that we’re anywhere near the end of the cosmic journey. I believe with Teilhard that the goal is not us – the goal is “more being”.
The universe has a tendency that is almost silly for us to overlook. Ever since the beginning, it has been in the process of more being or, as Teilhard puts it, of bringing things of a higher degree of value into existence. By anybody’s standards, there’s a real difference between the human brain and human culture, on the one hand, and the primordial radiation that the universe began with. Something is working itself out in this universe. What is that? At the very least, it is this process of becoming more and more complex in its mode of organization. But more than that, it has been in the business of producing higher degrees of awareness, of sentience, of feeling, of enjoyment, and especially of consciousness and freedom. But anybody who lives on this planet knows that we haven’t fully become conscious, that we still haven’t become fully free. We still get lost in our feelings and dull our senses; in other words, we live in an unfinished universe. And if the universe is unfinished, that that means it has a future. We don’t know exactly what that is, but it enjoins us to care for the natural world environmentally, for example, so that it does have the opportunity to have a future.
Right now what we’re doing is closing down life systems all over the planet, and that’s because we have assumed that we’re IT, that this is all, that this is the end of the journey. But if we consider that we are fellow travelers with nature and not the end of it all, then I think we would be more willing to take care of nature and to allow it to have the future that perhaps God has some vision of but we do not. We should leave ourselves open. We can’t describe or predict the evolutionary developments in the world’s future with any great accuracy, but maybe they would take the form of even deeper consciousness and deeper freedom, deeper capacity to love and feel, and so forth. At the very least, we should leave ourselves open to those possibilities.
~Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
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