and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, famously made the evolution of the cosmos the central theme of his posthumous book The Phenomenon of Man (1955). Here he embraced cosmic evolution, and argued for a teleological evolution in w…“earth to earth, ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust” to be literally true. Cosmic evolution provides us with a master narrative in which our own birth, life, and death are integral parts of the universe, without recourse to the supernatur…24. Smocovitis, Unifying Biology, pp. 142–153: 148. Connie Barlow’s book of readings, Evolution Extended: Biological Debates on the Meaning of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), clearly shows these wider evolutionary themes.
Cosmos and…
Thomas Berry
theologian · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Thomas Berry was a geologian and cultural historian who integrated evolutionary cosmology into a framework for understanding humanity's ecological and spiritual place within the universe. The course readings invoke Berry—alongside Teilhard de Chardin—to anchor arguments about cosmic evolution as a master narrative that makes human existence intelligible without recourse to the supernatural, positioning evolution as a unifying principle for both biology and culture. His work appears peripheral in these excerpts but functions to legitimize the notion that evolution provides meaning-making capacity beyond mere scientific mechanism.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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