Omega Point

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A Jesuit priest who dug for fossils in the deserts of China spent thirty years trying to write the universe as a single sentence. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a paleontologist by training, associated with the excavation of Peking Man, and a believer who could not accept that evolution and the Incarnation belonged to separate accounts of the world. The book in which he fused them was finished before the Second World War and forbidden to him in his lifetime; it appeared in 1955, the year he died, under the title Le phénomène humain. Its argument ends on a phrase that has since traveled far past his intentions: the Omega Point.

For Teilhard the cosmos is not a place but a process, which he called cosmogenesis. Matter does not merely sit and persist; it organizes, and as it grows more complexly organized it grows correspondingly more inward, more aware. He named this the law of complexity-consciousness, and read the whole of natural history as its working-out. The story unfolds in layers, each enveloping the last. First the geosphere, the inert stuff of rock and mineral. Then the biosphere, the living film that spreads across the planet’s surface. Then a third layer, his own coinage, developed alongside the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and the philosopher Édouard Le Roy: the noosphere, the thinking envelope of Earth, the planetary web woven of mind and culture. Each layer arrives by complexification, by the slow folding-in of the world upon itself, until thought itself becomes a geological force.

Behind the layering Teilhard placed a private physics of two energies. One he called tangential, the ordinary force that binds a thing to its neighbors at the same level of complexity — the energy of chemistry and connection. The other he called radial, the inward pull that drives matter toward greater organization and deeper consciousness, the secret engine of the whole ascent. The first is the energy science measures; the second is the one his system needs, and the one his critics would not grant him.

And the layers point somewhere. Teilhard did not believe evolution wandered. He believed it converged, that the noosphere was tightening toward a single terminus of maximal unity, a “sort of supreme consciousness” in which every individual awareness would be gathered up without being dissolved — each facet, he insisted, remaining conscious of itself at the end. That terminus is Omega. Its strangest feature is its tense. Omega is not only the finish of the process but its cause, an attractor already pulling creation toward it, a final cause working backward from the future into the present. The world is drawn forward, on this account, by something that in some sense already is.

Here the paleontology gives way to theology, and the distinction matters. The decisive move of Teilhard’s system is to name the attractor. Omega, he held, is Christ — the cosmic Logos of the letters of Paul and John, the one in whom “all things hold together” and into whom all things are drawn. Cosmogenesis is thus revealed as Christogenesis: the universe is not merely evolving but being divinized, gathered through Christ into God. The final state he imagined as a kind of cosmic liturgy, the whole created order become an offering. This is a claim of faith, not a finding of science, and Teilhard’s readers have not always kept the seam in view. He himself, in the prose-poem Mass on the World, written in 1923 in the Ordos desert with no altar but the earth, had already tried to say it directly: to consecrate not bread but the planet.

Rome was not reassured. Teilhard’s theological writings were restricted throughout his life — Le Milieu Divin refused approval in 1927, the man himself forbidden by 1947 to write or teach on philosophical questions, Le phénomène humain blocked from print. Seven years after his death, on 30 June 1962, the Holy Office issued a monitum, a warning, cautioning that his works “abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine,” and urging that the minds of the young be guarded against them. A monitum is a caution, not a condemnation, and the precision is worth keeping: none of Teilhard’s works was ever placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. The warning has, as of this writing, never been formally rescinded — and yet the weather around him warmed. In 1981 the Holy See reaffirmed the caution while granting that his thought deserved continued study. Joseph Ratzinger, before he became Benedict XVI, praised the cosmic Christology as a genuine service to faith. In 2009, preaching at vespers in Aosta, Benedict spoke of the priest’s task as consecrating the world “so that it may become a living host, a liturgy” — language his own spokesman acknowledged as Teilhard’s. Francis cited his eschatological vision in Laudato si’.

Scientists, for their part, divided sharply, and the most famous verdict was withering. Reviewing the English edition in 1961, the immunologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar called the book “nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits,” and charged its author with “an active willingness to be deceived.” Others were warmer — the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky judged Teilhard one of the great thinkers of the age. The scholarly settlement has mostly landed in between, and slightly downhill: the work reads now as theology and philosophy in scientific dress, a teleological metaphysic of evolution that cannot be tested as the science it sometimes resembles. Its critics within the faith add that its sweeping optimism never quite reckons with evil.

That might have been the whole of the matter — a contested vision, half mysticism and half natural history, slowly rehabilitated. But the term had a second life, and the second life is where the confusion begins. In 1994 the mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, of Tulane University and co-author of the respected Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published The Physics of Immortality. He took Teilhard’s word and used it for a claim that is not theology at all but a prediction dressed as engineering. Tipler’s Omega Point is a physical event in the deep future, and his argument runs as a chain. The universe, he supposed, is closed: it will stop expanding and fall back together toward a final singularity, a Big Crunch. Intelligent life, before that, must spread to engulf all matter and actively steer the collapse, keeping conditions fit for computation. As the cosmos contracts the available computational capacity diverges toward infinity, so that an unlimited number of computational steps can be run in the finite time remaining — an eternity of subjective experience packed into the last instant. That final singularity is the Omega Point, and a civilization with infinite computation could, he argued, resurrect every person who ever lived by simulating them in sufficient detail: resurrection as emulation. This Omega, too, Tipler identified with God, claiming for it “all the properties of God claimed by most traditional religions.” The scaffolding under the whole was a principle he had earlier framed with the astronomer John Barrow — the Final Anthropic Principle, the assertion that intelligent information-processing, once it appears in the universe, will never die out. A later book, The Physics of Christianity (2007), pushed further, proposing physical mechanisms for the Gospel miracles.

The borrowing is real and the divergence is total. Teilhard’s Omega is spirit drawing the world from the future; Tipler’s is hardware engineered from the past. Teilhard expected humanity to remain on Earth; Tipler required life to swallow the cosmos. Teilhard’s resurrection is a theological transformation, persons kept in Christ; Tipler’s is a literal copy, run on a computer at the end of time. What they share is a name, a sense of cosmic history as convergent, and the nerve to call the destination God.

Tipler’s version did not survive contact with the discipline it claimed. The cosmologist George Ellis, reviewing it in Nature, called it “a masterpiece of pseudoscience.” The physicist Sean Carroll, who allowed that Tipler’s early work in relativity was sound, judged the later turn the work of a “crackpot.” And the scheme has a single fatal dependency: it requires a universe that recollapses. In 1998 the observation of distant supernovae revealed that cosmic expansion is not slowing but accelerating, driven by what is now called dark energy, in a universe measured as spatially flat. There is, on present evidence, no Big Crunch coming. Without the collapse there is no diverging computation, no infinite subjective time, no Omega Point. This is not one objection among many but established cosmology, and it leaves Tipler’s edifice standing on a foundation the sky removed.

What remains, oddly, is the lineage. Teilhard is now routinely claimed as a forerunner of the technological singularity, credited with glimpsing the acceleration of progress toward a threshold and even with anticipating a global network of minds. Tipler’s resurrection-by-simulation reads, in hindsight, as an ancestor of the mind-uploading literature. The two Omega Points, so unlike in substance, are nonetheless read together by people building a third thing from both. A man who offered the planet on a desert morning, and a man who did the arithmetic of the last second of time, were answering, in incompatible grammars, the same old question about where all this is going.

→ Related: Noosphere · Technological Singularity · Transhumanism · Mind Uploading