When Bill Gates recently told The Observer that artificial intelligence represents an “evolutionary event”, his words attracted considerable attention. And rightly so. But I couldn’t help smiling. Gates is describing something remarkably close to a vision first developed by a French Jesuit priest some eighty years ago.
In 1977, as a twenty-year-old student immersed in the mechanics of vertebrate evolution, I came across a book that fundamentally changed how I understood the world: The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Teilhard was both a distinguished palaeontologist and a Jesuit priest. His ideas were so radical that the Catholic Church refused him permission to publish his major philosophical works during his lifetime. The Phenomenon of Man, written largely during the 1930s and 1940s, was finally published in French in 1955, the year he died.
The English edition appeared in 1959, with an enthusiastic introduction by Sir Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist, secular humanist and first Director-General of UNESCO. Despite their very different religious convictions, the two men shared a remarkable vision of humanity’s evolutionary future. Huxley was also an early champion of transhumanism, the idea that humanity might consciously transcend its present limitations.
What captivated me about Teilhard was the extraordinary sweep of his thinking. He saw evolution not simply as the biological process I was studying, but as something far greater: a continuous unfolding from simple matter to increasing complexity and consciousness.
First came atoms, then molecules, then living cells, increasingly complex organisms and, eventually, the emergence of reflective human consciousness.
But Teilhard believed evolution didn’t stop there.
He proposed that humanity was entering a new evolutionary phase in which the development of ideas, knowledge and collective consciousness would become increasingly important. He called this emerging sphere of interconnected human thought the noosphere — a new layer of consciousness enveloping the Earth, just as the biosphere is the layer of life.
Writing decades before the internet, Teilhard imagined humanity becoming progressively more interconnected, with technology helping to create something resembling a global network of thought.
He wasn’t predicting ChatGPT or the internet in any literal technological sense. But the resemblance between his noosphere and our emerging world of digital networks and artificial intelligence is extraordinary.
For Teilhard, this wasn’t simply technological progress. It was evolution continuing through a new medium: consciousness itself. And he believed this process would ultimately lead towards what he called the Omega Point, a final convergence of consciousness and unity with God.
One doesn’t have to share his Christian theology to find the evolutionary argument fascinating.
Indeed, that is what struck me most strongly in 1977. Here was a scientist who had spent his life studying the fossil record, yet saw humanity not as the culmination of evolution but as a transitional stage in something much larger.
Nearly fifty years later, with artificial intelligence beginning to transform how we think, communicate and create knowledge, that idea seems more relevant than ever.
Of course, there is an important question Teilhard could not answer, and which confronts us rather urgently today: if evolution is now proceeding through intelligence and technology, where is it taking us — and who, if anyone, is directing it?
Over the years, I have returned repeatedly to Teilhard’s ideas, exploring the connections between evolution, consciousness, theology and technology. Bill Gates’s recent remarks prompted me to bring together some of those earlier reflections.
I have found resonance with his ideas from scientists and thinkers including for instance Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Philip Goff and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This has led me to a belief in the one-ness of consciousness within creation, in purpose behind evolution and in love as the driving force behind it.
The posts below are a selection from the past 15 years of my exploration of different aspects of a question that first fascinated me as a student nearly fifty years ago.