The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

“a truly big history, one that has yet to be written, will highlight the irony that scientific materialists denied that human subjectivity really exists while at the same time trusting that their own intelligent subjectivity, though allegedly nonexistent, is solely qualified to discover meaning and truth!”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Instead of looking at the universe in light of the fact that it has become conscious, scientific naturalism assumes that the universe is essentially unconscious. Then it tries—not without the aura of sorcery—to “explain” the emergent fact of mind solely in terms of what it takes to be mindless matter.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“True, evolution involves immense amounts of time, innumerable accidents, and the impersonal “laws” of nature, but the materialist belief system fails to show exactly how the interplay of dumbness and darkness can manufacture minds whose main function is to rescue us from dumbness and darkness. Time alone, even deep time, cannot add up to an explanation of mind unless something else is going into its creation.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Nostalgia can easily become a substitute for hope. It can twist human longing for a new future into an obsession with recovering imagined past idyllic moments in religious, personal, natural, or national history.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“A creator who brings into being a world that in turn gives rise to new kinds of being from out of its own resourcefulness is certainly more impressive than a hypothesized “designer” who molds and micromanages everything in the world directly.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“According to most Christian evolutionists, especially Teilhard, Darwin’s new science now makes it possible to think of God’s power to create as more impressive than ever.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“the religious obsession with expiation as a reasonable response to the fact of evil. This is partly why evolution is potentially such good news for theology.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Evolution and cosmogenesis, to come back to our starting point, imply that the world is unfinished. But, if it is unfinished, we cannot justifiably expect it ever previously to have been perfect. It inevitably has a dark side as long as it is still coming into being. Redemption, therefore, if it means anything at all, must include the healing of the tragic evil that accompanies the existence of any universe whose journey is not yet over.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“A perfectly designed universe would not be sufficiently independent of God to have its own existence and distinct identity. It could never have established sufficient autonomy or dialogical distance from the Creator to be lovingly espoused by God or to love God.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Evolution means that creation is still happening, and that God is creating the world not a retro, that is, from out of the past, but ab ante, from the up-ahead.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Everything that we can make out in the cosmic past with the help of science suggests that the universe has always been open to further increase in being and value.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Scientific materialism, with its message of cosmic pessimism, is the consequence of a failure not only of vision and hope but also of logic.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“The science-based idea that the universe is still coming into being offers a promising—and I believe realistic—framework for understanding biblical hope and for a correspondingly fresh understanding of the practice of love.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“As long as Christians are given the impression that everything important had already been accomplished in an initial creative instant, can anything really worthwhile still remain for us to do—as more than one modern philosopher has asked? Might not the assumption of an initially completed universe unconsciously suppress the creative vitality needed to sustain both hope and vigorous moral effort?”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“the scientifically established fact that our universe is still in process invites Christian theology to think in new ways about God, creation, suffering, death, incarnation, sin, evil and redemption, grace and freedom, eschatology, and the virtues of faith, hope, and love.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“If the cosmos is still unfinished and hence still being drawn toward deeper and richer syntheses up ahead, then its intelligibility is something we cannot possess but only anticipate.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“religious thought in general has scarcely begun to absorb the historical understanding of the cosmos that has taken shape in scientific thought after Einstein.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“The God of evolution continually creates the world anew not by pushing things from the past, but by drawing the world forward toward a new future from up ahead. The future is the primary dwelling place of God.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Human love flourishes most fully and effectively where there is a sustained—indeed intergenerational—expectation that something really big is awaiting all things up ahead.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“This pessimism is unfortunate because wherever hope is absent, love scarcely has a chance to survive, let alone flourish.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“what theology had formerly idealized as the primacy of spirit gradually became for Teilhard the primacy of the Future.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Teilhard says we must be ready to “try everything.” This hope requires a more adventurous moral life than what we find in classical religious patterns of piety, but Teilhard was looking for a morality rooted in hope—not only for humanity but for the whole universe. His attention to the cosmos and its future can cause confusion to theologians of “the eternal present” who have not yet fully awakened to the fact of an unfinished universe.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Teilhard shared with Whitehead, for example, the conviction that our own mental activity is an aspect of nature, not something that occurs outside of nature.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence.13”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

“Consequently, it would be unwise for an anticipatory cosmic vision to espouse an exclusively sacramentalist or activist approach. I am opposing, here, any transhumanist adventures that fail to consider prayerfully their possible impact on the already realized cosmic values we have been discussing in this book. If we take a purely sacramentalist approach, it is likely to ignore Teilhard’s belief that we are entitled by God to bring new and unrepeatable kinds of being into existence. Yet, transhumanist experiments may also fail to respect, protect, and enhance such values as vitality, subjectivity (including consciousness and freedom), and creativity (whose measure is its aesthetic intensity). This would amount to a tragic end to the story of life. Failure to align ourselves faithfully and docilely with the values that have been established in the emergence of the universe up until now could lead the cosmos into an abyss.”
― John F. Haught, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin