Philosophy of Religion

The Future of Man

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

1959

The Future of Man collects Teilhard de Chardin's essays on the direction and destiny of human civilisation, written between 1920 and 1952. The essays address the question of whether human evolution has stalled — whether, now that biological evolution has slowed, humanity is drifting without direction — and Teilhard's answer is emphatically negative. The noosphere — the sphere of collective human thought and culture — is itself evolving, converging, and intensifying. The essays trace the trajectory of this convergence: the rise of global interconnection, the emergence of collective consciousness, and the eventual arrival at what Teilhard calls the Omega Point, the terminal focus of cosmic evolution. Alongside his scientific optimism, Teilhard addresses the role of love — understood cosmologically — as the energy driving convergence, and the relationship between this vision and Christian eschatology.