This website explores the life and legacy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an early 20th Century French Jesuit priest and scientist, as it introduces an inspiring film about him, TEILHARD: Visionary Scientist.

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DVDs of TEILHARD: Visionary Scientist are now available through the Maryland Public Television online store. Order your copy at this link.

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IN FOCUS

A Scientist’s Perspective

Robert E. Ulanonwicz is a noted biologist who approaches the tension between science and faith with both a rigorous scientific approach, and a personal commitment to his religious beliefs, echoing the life of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. After a long career as a theoretical ecologist and extensive writing in that field, he now tackles a dilemma he first faced as a graduate student – how to reconcile his faith and be true to the science he was learning.

As he tells it, Ulanowicz found his faith “shaken to the core” by a collegiate course in philosophy that emphasized material and mechanical foundations for the creation of the world. But he nevertheless “persisted in searching for clues to give meaning to the nature of the cosmos and the evolution of life as we know it.” The result is The First Incarnation: Hope in Reality, which “introduces theoretical ecosystems’ results to enrich the dialogue between science and religion.”

Ulanowicz approaches this book with scientific rigor. Reaching adulthood in the midst of his career in ecology, his work with networks of connected living processes convinced him that the importance of processes eclipses the subsidiary role that classical thermodynamics had assigned to them. Rather, Ulanowicz discovered what he considers the origins of phenomena that had been considered subjective and outside the purview of physics.

For Teilhard, the key to evolution is the psychic or subjective dimension found in all matter, from untraceable in “purely physical” matter to self-reflective consciousness in the human being. The exclusion of subjective reality from the scientific process was a problem for Teilhard. And now Ulanowicz arrives at his own perspective on this in strictly scientific terms.

In this work, Ulanowicz deconstructs the prevailing view among many scientists that all causality issues from below via the universal force laws of physics at micro-scales and propagates up the hierarchy of life. Though these laws are not violated, they lose their powers to determine outcomes at larger scales and can only constrain against impossible outcomes. Agency must be added to the foundations of evolutionary theory, and this reformation provides rationale for believers to regard agency as an action of a Creator.

Ulanowicz is a graduate of the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and received his PhD in chemical engineering from The Johns Hopkins University. He spent his career as a theoretical ecologist at the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, specializing in ecological network analysis. Ulanowicz received the 2007 Ilya A Prigogine Medal for excellence in ecosystem dynamics and has published three books on the philosophy of ecosystem theory and 216 publications in refereed scientific journals (including twelve essays in journals on science and religion).