the Phenomenon of Man

This book by Pierre Tielhard de Chardin is about the evolution of consciousness (which will sound familiar to regular readers, as this is the exact same theme as Owen Barfield's book Unancestral Voice that I read recently - only Barfield explores it with a more spiritual-poetic logic while de Chardin is rigorously scientific). Getting through this has taken me a couple of months - it is not particularly easy reading; ranging in field of discussion from physics & metaphysics to biology & metabiology* to anthropology & history & psychology - all neatly tied together with a persistent strain of philosophical striving after purpose & direction.

   While I think I more or less understood the arguments he was making throughout, I certainly couldn't summarise them, but I do think he did a marvellously cogent job of working through cosmic science from basic atomic theory through natural history into human social & spiritual development, finally landing on a brilliantly deft conclusion that the simultaneous fundamental underpinnings & absolute zenith of the universe is Love.** If you're scientifically-minded and skeptical but open to the possibility of a theistic cosmos I reckon you'll get a lot of interesting provocation out of reading this.

* In a cosmic sense rather than the more technological sense with which this field is referred to today - I certainly think there is ample ground for an interesting PhD to be had if anyone wanted to make proper notes on a reading of this and looking for overlaps with Moltmann's theology of creation (especially on the complex nexus on interconnected relationships between the biosphere & the noosphere).

** While this as a conclusion is a very powerful Christian apologetic, I haven't classified this book as such as the vast majority of it is pretty purely scientific-philosophical (moreover in the epilogue, the only part of the text that explicitly discusses the Christian faith, de Chardin makes it abundantly clear that apologia was not his intention in writing this).