Lionel Trilling was one of the most prominent literary critics of the century. A supremely smart, urbane mind, he did not fall into many of the traps in which many other minds and many literary critics this century seem prone to. For him the text, whether a poem or a novel, whether philosophy or an essay was not merely a collection of words. The idea of self-reference, the idea that texts are somewhat closed into themselves and do not or cannot deal with the world we live in was completely foreign to him. In fact, for Trilling, literature was a way to engage with the world. Literature and knowledge as a whole worked like a two way street. Thinkers' lives, their sorrows and joys, their routine as well as some extraordinary events shaped their moral, aesthetic, theological vision and in articulating their vision, these thinkers, in turn, transformed the moral, aesthetic and theological views of readers. In short, Trilling believed that literature had not only a context in the culture but also that it had relevance in the history of the culture. It impacted lives.

And yet, in the passage we have chosen to quote, the complete opposite seems to be the truth. He seems at first to be saying that authors are incapable of synthesis, incapable of providing answers. The quote comes from Trilling's essay on John Dos Passos. The essay, in fact praises John Dos Passos' trilogy and painstakingly tallies its literary accomplishments. What it also records is other critics' reaction to the novel and in doing so, it shows us how the culture of celebrity, the culture of fame tends to distort the expectations we have from books and from authors. What Trilling ultimately asks, in other words, is whether we are asking the right things from books when we turn authors into celebrities? In the world of entertainment, where the star is manufactured to be worshipped, its is logical that we expect perfection, flawlessness. Since through the icons of the screen we vicariously satisfy so many of our needs, when it comes to books, we expect the same from books. Nevertheless language and knowledge's modus operandi is not the same as that of the media.

Thinker and author, in fact, work in a completely different way and even when they purport to give us syntheses and answers, their syntheses and answers will not only reveal their flawed humanity beneath but also provide syntheses and answers as only language can do, through the shortcuts of rhetoric, with the urgent aid of metaphor, and the need of figures of speech. Despite the nature of such knowledge, we still idolize thinkers beyond what they should be idolized. Witness, for instance, the celebrity status of a figures like Stephen Hawkins. After his book A Brief History of Time became a surprising best seller, Hawkins was turned into guru, not only in the physics community, where he is rightfully recognized as one of the sharpest minds, but also in the media. Similarly Stephen Jay Gould is another scientist who has gained a celebrity status and used it to be the spokesperson for a couple of causes. Documentary or news flash we encounter these sort of figure over and over, till what the culture perceives as knowledge and thought is merely the rehearsed sound bite.

The downside to intellectuals acquiring a status in the culture is not only the degeneration of thought into SoundBits, but what trilling points out here. People do not expect from books and knowledge now a days what they expected years ago. Before mass media invaded the way in which we think of people, of fame etc., people understood that one gained knowledge from books in an accruing fashion. No book held all the answers, but the right books in the right order formed an education. Now, those who market authors and intellectuals as celebrities promise to give us messiahs who will solve all spiritual or intellectual conundrums. What happens when these intellects do not deliver? Then the critic's and the audiences' judgment tends to be drastic, tends to have the sort of heartbreak that only those who have been lied to.

To many this problem might be too unimportant in the culture of the day. Nevertheless, it is more pernicious than what might seem since the over-inflation of intellect and its aftermath has set a new way to assess old works. For instance, some decades ago, one still found that those scholars who wanted to assess or write about someone like Marx, went and read Marx as they would read any other author. In other words, unless they were left-wing ideologies, Das Kapital held for them the same status than any other philosophical work. Those scholars would explain some ideas, revise some others, etc. The most recent Marx biography shows how far we have come since those days. No more are we to take Marx as an important nineteenth century intellectual, but as a prophet and since his prophecy failed, a flawed prophet. In fact Marx's newest biography does not talk Das Kapital at all but rather dwells on every personal detail of Marx's life that would topple him from the prophet's pedestal.

Marx, of course has not been the only victim of this tendency. Freud and Nietzsche, Shostakovich and Schoenberg, are among the many truly important and influential thinkers who have suffered this sort of critical treatment. In fact, even a reputation that seemed as steadfast as that of Darwin has had its setbacks. Among the great minds of the century, no one has suffered more neglect more misunderstanding and has been a greater victim of this intellectual tendency than Teilhard the Chardin. The strange part is that there has been purposeful neglect and misunderstanding toward Teilhard de Chardin. Unlike any of those people whom we mentioned above, Teilhard de Chardin's ideas are in no way threatening to anybody outside the hierarchy of the Catholic church. His theory is rather commonsensical. And his status is not that of the parent to anything. If critics wield sticks to Freud, they do it with the knowledge that they are threatening a parental figure. But de Chardin has not swayed the same kind of influence. So why the misunderstanding, why the neglect?

Teilhard de Chardin's most important work is synthetic and provides answers. The mode in which he provides these answers and the way in which he synthesized the different disciplines to arrive to his conclusions was by necessity elliptical and because the scope and the ambitions of the work oblivious of academic minutiae. In short, while many evolutionary scientists spend page after page fiddling over definitions, Teilhard de Chardin's best work accepts these definitions a priori. Teilhard de Chardin's point of view is directly responsible for his vision since he did not comb for evidence of what seemed to him self evident but rather assumed it true and tried to find a larger more important context. It is his hubris - his attempt to write a book that synthesized and that provided vital and important answers - combined with his disregard for academic convention that has made critic after critic disregard, dismiss or even put down his work.

It has been our sole aim in this book to redress the ill done to Teilhard de Chardin's work. In fact, the bulk of this book could be seen as filling the gaps that Teilhard de Chardin left open as he formulated his vision. But since scientists care little for the kind of work that Teilhard de Chardin did and have directed their research in different direction, the task has been more than hard. Often we had to reinterpret rather complicated theories and point out what many of their exponents refuse to see. Often, we have felt like gumshoes searching the last scientific clue to piece the puzzle together. And yet, as we were writing the last chapter, we were more than encouraged to see our entire argument somewhat redeemed for right beside a picture of a worker removing stain glass windows in St. Michael's a headline read: "Tiniest of Particles Pokes Big Hole in Physics Theory."

Throughout the book we have, of course, pointed out the insufficiency of the Standard Model. We have argued, in fact, that to understand matter and the forces that govern it, one has to think of yet another more powerful force which perhaps might have its own material manifestation but whose entire role is to check the way in which all forces and particles behave. We have argued that the role of "particles" in the quantum fluctuation that propelled the Big Bang was seminal. Unfortunately, throughout we have has to work on good faith, if not imagine the existence, all along knowing that if such thing would exists it would shatter the most cherished of all scientific models. The new particle does not deliver as much as we had hoped, or at least not yet. But alongside the revival of Einstein's cosmological constant as a possible component in the universe this discovery points to the right direction. We will deal with both here.

The particles were discovered in an experiment called E821, where muons, created by a particle accelerator known as the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, were injected into a powerful magnetic field and the frequency of their wobble was measured with incredible precision. Physicists have always known that this frequency is affected by the properties of space itself. According to the laws of quantum, which we have discussed as the laws that rule the subatomic realm, apparently empty space is actually a sea of what scientists call "virtual particles," particles that briefly appear and disappear and interact with the muon. The Standard model shows scientists how to calculate the effect that all known particles in that sea should have on the wobble frequency. While the predicted shifts have all been measured and ratified, the new measurements differ from those predictions, suggesting that previously unknown particles are lurking in the subatomic sea.

Both the emergence of this shattering new particle as well as the suspicion that the cosmological constant might indeed be a factor to contend are, for| us, the most recent hints that Teilhard de Chardin's vision might be redeemed someday. Both numbers seem to belie the idea that the universe is one of chaos and randomness. At the subatomic level, the new discovery proves that the Standard Model is insufficient and inaccurate and at the cosmic level the cosmological constant suggests that the fine-tuning of the universe to allow for evolution might just be possible.

The skeptics, of course, will always be there. As much as one would like to fill every gap that Teilhard de Chardin left open, one or another antagonist to his ideas will argue against it. The skeptic's voice is a healthy presence in our disciplines. But skepticism, as healthy and natural as it might be has always had its limits. And if one were to be a skeptic about everything, no theory would hold water. Take for instance the Big Bang theory. Taught in classrooms and currently accepted as the theory on the inception of the universe, the name Big Bang was introduced by the celebrated Cambridge theorist Fred Hoyle as a derisive description of a theory he found untenable. Like many physicists Hoyle favored the "steady state" theory, a theory that argued that new atoms and new galaxies formed continuously in the gaps as the universe expanded, so that its average properties never changed. At the time that Hoyle came up with the moniker for what remains as the Big Bang theory, there really was no evidence for either camp because observations did not probe deep enough into the evolution. Gradually, as researchers were forced to refine their experiments to confirm either the steady state theory or the Big Bang theory, the evidence for the Big Bang emerged and the Big Bang became the accepted theory. The theory, however, even today has its gaps and skeptics could still question its validity. Such exercise though would seem more a waste of energy than a valid attempt to rectify any problem with science. For most scientists, in other words, it suffices that the background radiation had the expected spectrum, that the neutrino count would have been higher, that the abundance of deuterium is not out of line with the amount that was expected to survive from the big bang. This is really the evidence upon which such an important theory rests unquestioned.

So the question is, if a theory is accepted as such with what seems scarce proof, why the resistance to the change in paradigms that Teilhard de Chardin's vision seems to require? Is there not enough evidence to back Teilhard de Chardin's vision. We hope the body of the book sufficed to prove Teilhard de Chardin right. Teilhard de Chardin's vision is simple. He took Darwin's theory of evolution and applied it to the cosmos. Evolution, in other words, did not start with a protein chain that managed to polymerize on earth. Polymer and its eventual offspring were, for Teilhard de Chardin only part of a continuum, part of a process that had begun with the Big Bang. We have seen how at the cosmic level, Teilhard de Chardin's theory is easy to prove. The Big Bang itself and the subsequent expansion of the universe allow us to view the cosmos in the temporal dimension that is tantamount to evolution. Furthermore, the emergence of heavier and heavier elements from light ones through the usage of a rather simple structure might be the best way to see how complexity unfolded from simple laws. The structure of the universe itself, in other words, the way in which the cosmos arranged the materials that emerged throughout its evolution follows a complex fractal pattern, a pattern which is found in both evolution as well as ecosystems. Many phenomena in nature are fractals. As we have previously seen, a fractal is a pattern with the special mathematical feature that a fragment when magnified resembles the whole. Our universe is a fractal, but not as simple as the ones one finds in mountain coastline or tree. If it were, of course, it would not only be devoid of live, but it would have not allowed the variety that is necessary for any type of evolution. Cosmic structures encompass a wide range of dimensions: star, galaxy, clusters and super clusters. Still, once observers reach large scales, those large scales begin repeating themselves, so a fragment of 200 million light years does resemble the whole of the universe.

The large scale, the protracted duration of both expansion as well as the emergence of a structure all confirm what for Teilhard de Chardin was crucial, the fine tuning of the universe. Despite the fact that it is hard for scientists to deny, this fine-tuning is a fact that they much rather acknowledge. They will grant that intricate complexity has unfolded from simple laws. They will also agree that the latter fact is not always guaranteed. They know in fact, that the numbers had to be right for complexity to emerge from this simple laws. The slightest variation would have yielded a boring, in not a sterile universe. Scientists also know that once they touch upon the fine tuning of the universe, once they begin discussion how the fine tuning allowed for the emergence of more and more refined structures which allowed for complexity, then they have reached the limits of science and are entering that region which they have refused to enter for the last fifty years, they enter the realm where science has relevance, where science has public answers about our world and about the fact that we are here.

There are various ways of reacting to the fine-tuning of the universe. The first response is to say that we could not exist if these numbers were not what they are. Many scientists take a sort of pragmatic, no philosophical approach and say "we are here so there is nothing to be surprised about." The philosopher John Leslie has illustrated how erroneous this approach is through a parable: Suppose you are facing a firing squad. 50 marksmen take aim, but they all miss. If they hadn't missed you would have not had survived to ponder the matter. Would you just leave it a t that? You'd still be baffled and most probably would seek the reason of your good fortune. We are here and since time immemorial we have pondered the reason why. Many of the most pragmatist scientists tell us to look elsewhere for the answer. They do so at the peril of science's own initial aims, since from its inception, science has been one of the chief tools for understanding why we are here. In fact, it is possible to argue that the original impulse behind scientific thought was to provide answers.

The answers are not always simple. In fact, soon we will see how the answers embedded in Teilhard de Chardin's vision are not only not simple, but actually entail difficult changes in the way we think, act and live. Teilhard de Chardin was a believer. His belief was in no way reductive or simplistic. In fact, to him the attitude of many who see the fine tuning of the cosmos as evidence of a beneficent creator would seem reductive and beside the point. This is of course the argument by design. John Poilkinghorne, the scientist theologian might be the argument's most articulate spokesman. For him the universe is not just "any old world, but it is special and finely tuned for life because it is the creation of a Creator who wills that it should be so." Poilkinghorne's argument is fine if what one wants is to confirm one's believes in a supreme being. Like too many theological arguments, it lacks proscriptive force. In fact, we find it at hart tremendously dangerous in the same way that a lot of religious dogma has been dangerous throughout history. It sheds any responsibility from us other than what the current theological dogma grants us. In short, it gazes at the universe, an like the skeptical scientist's first response, puts it beyond out reach and beyond our business, failing to answer the questions which if answered would determine our future behavior.

If Teilhard de Chardin's vision has been disturbing to many, it is not because of its theological underpinnings, nor for its interpretation of evolution. If the theory is threatening it has been because it answers the questions in very specific ways and in doing so proscribes the way in which we are to proceed as a species, as a culture, as a civilization. For the essence of Teilhard de Chardin's vision is what we have come to call ecological. His ecology is not limited to ecosystems and the planet, but is a cosmic ecology. Few scientists have taken the Teilhard de Chardin's cue and the few who have hardly applied it to its fullest scope. But it is important for us to see how Teilhard de Chardin's theory has been used so that we see the dangers on applying Teilhard de Chardin's theory and the ways in which these dangers can be averted.

The most famous spokesperson for a de Teilhardian view might be J.E. Lovelock. In Gaia: A New Look at life on earth, Lovelock argued that "the earth is living matter. Air, oceans and land surface form a complex system that can be seen as a single organism." What Lovelock calls Gaia, in other words, is "a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain as fit and comfortable habitat for life." To argue his case, Lovelock observes a lot of the improbabilities that Gaia seems to overcome. The atmosphere is one of these. It is not the kind that our planet should have. Based on the overall chemical composition of the Earth, certain atmospheric gases that are rare, should be far more common. Certain common gases should be rare. The law of entropy seems to be in abeyance. According to Lovelock, the only explanation to these phenomena is that "life" has taken a guiding hand. Carbon-dioxide might be the most familiar example. Beside being byproduct of respiration by animals and plants, and of the burning fossil fuels, this gas occurs naturally as a result of various non biological processes. By admitting and then trapping solar radiation, it helps the Earth hold heat. Oxygen concentration might be another proof of Gaia. Oxygen, a rare gas, is made artificially common. Three and a half billion years ago, at the dawn of the organic evolution life took hold in the form of simple anaerobic creatures suited specifically to an oxygen poor environment. But then about two billion years ago there came on of evolution's most drastic transitions, the change over to an oxygen burning metabolic economy which has provided greater supplies of chemical energy for a greater range of biological possibilities. This changeover was possible because the ecosystem Lovelock calls Gaia balanced the scarcity of oxygen by splitting carbon dioxide in half during photosynthesis and burying the carbon away in forms such as peat, coal and oil.

Lovelock's vision of earth as a balanced living form of its own pares well with Teilhard de Chardin's argument. Teilhard de Chardin's vision however is vaster, more encompassing. It also, despite Teilhard de Chardin's optimism, avoids many of the pitfalls inherent to Lovelock's Gaia theory. For Lovelocks central tenet is that the Earth possesses a potent, cybernetic and vastly underrated capacity to keep itself healthy. Lovelock believes that earth can heal itself when its environment has been injured. It is this optimism which proved to be the most fatal flaw in Lovelock's interpretation of Teilhard de Chardin's theory. Lovelock insists that the concern over green house effect is trivial. The worry over ozone reduction is similarly ridiculous. The pollution belched from smokestacks and puked into rivers is according to Lovelock a minor ailment that Gaia can repair. The theory, at first ecologically sound, falters under its own argument and becomes a sterile, cold vision of evolution and the Earth. For it fails to answer one crucial question: if the planet is a living thing and all its inhabitants are like tissue that makes up this living thing, then when humanity's earthly misbehavior has progressed to the point where the wounds on Gaia are deep enough that Gaia might go on with life but that life will not sustain us, wouldn't the absence of Homo sapiens, or the absence of any living thing be proof of an irreparable wound? Wouldn't it prove that Gaia cannot repair all the damage?

Lovelock's vision is ultimately irresponsible in its optimism and it shows the dangers inherent in trying to take such sweeping vision as Teilhard de Chardin's. Lovelock's vision sees extinction and answers "so what? What if a bunch of species go extinct? Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so." Biologists and paleontologists speak of a background levels of extinctions throughout the history of life, That background level is the routine average rate at which a species disappear. It is generally balanced by the rate of speciation, the rate at which a species evolve. These two together, extinction and speciation constitute another form of turn over. Rates of extinction in the remote past cannot be calculated precisely because of the gaps in the fossil record. But paleontologist David Jablonski has made an informed guess and placed the background extinction at "perhaps a few species per million years." A few mammals, a few fish etc. over a million years. Such losses at such rate can be counterbalanced by speciation. Extinction at that level is a sustainable process. And if it were the only kind of extinction, the Gaia argument would be tenable.

But there are other extinctions. Against the background extinction, a number of big events have emerged. These cataclysms are mass extinctions that scientists now recognize as the major punctuation marks in the history of life on earth. Some of this extinctions are so famous, they serve as textbook examples most of the time: the Cretaceous extinction is one; the Permian extinction another one. What characterizes this massive extinction is the fact that they take place within a brief span of years. Consequently the extinction rate exceeds the rate of speciation. When this happens, there are two dire outcomes, the richness of the biosphere plummets and the ecosystems are thrown out of balance. With ecosystems left ravaged, it takes millions of years for speciation to fill the gaps.

The debate over what caused the mass extinction of the past will probably never be resolved. Some speculate on meteorological changes. Others go as far as to posit the existence of a "Death Star" that orbits mutually with our sun, exerting cosmic gravitational drag and pulling a massive amount of asteroids near earth every 26 million years. We won't go into either of the theories now. What's important is really to understand what constitutes a mass extinction. According to Jablonsky, a mass extinction entails an extinction rate double the background level among many different plant and animal groups. The Cretaceous extinction did just that, wiping the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So did the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, as it claimed half the extant families of marine invertebrates. What is more terrifying than these remote events might be the fact that if we look loosely at Jablonsky's definition and observe the ecological impact that humans have had on this planet, then we are going through a massive extinction right now. In fact, the massive extinction started years ago, when humans from the Neolithic cultures along the fringes of the continents began venturing across the open sea in hollowed out boats. They colonized remote islands such as Madagascar, New Zealand, New Caledonia and the Hawaiian archipelago. This colonization quickly killed off some endemic bird species. From the time of the Neolithic voyages, past the European colonization of the Asia, Africa and the New World, to out days, twenty percent of the world's bird species have gone extinct. During recent centuries, as the industrial revolution and its concomitant, the exploitation of natural resources came to a climax, the rate of extinction increased even more, and the danger spread from birds, a frail and easily damages sort of animal, to more resilient animals and plants. In fact, within a few decades, if present trends continue, we will be loosing a lot of everything.

If Lovelock's vision borrows from De Chardin's, it does so at De Chardin's expense. In our opinion, Gaia theory seems at first sight quite logical and appealing. The upshot of Lovelock's reasoning, his believe that Gaia will repair its wounds ultimately cheats Teilhard de Chardin's vision. As we discussed in the previous chapter, the keystone to Teilhard de Chardin's ideas lies in his believe in complexity as the arrow which guides evolution. And if Teilhard de Chardin's vision is relevant today is because in his vision of a world where complexity is the destination, our current trends as a culture, our behavior as a species is completely counter to this vision. For we should remember that as we extinguish a large portion of the planet's biological diversity, we will lose also a large portion of the world's complexity, since complexity. This complaint is of course old song for many and many are tired and jaded from hearing it. But the numbers from the experts are staggering. Paul Ehrlich estimates that conservatively, the extinction rate is 100 times more than the background level. Ed Wilson, researching invertebrates in the rain forest, estimates that the current loss of rain forest species is a thousand times above normal level. It goes without saying that these numbers reach the same gloomy conclusion: our devastating impact of the biosphere is suicidal. At the rate we are going we will not survive long enough as a species. Lovelock might be right. Yes, the richness of the Earth ecosystems might recover. But the setback will be deep and devastating and it will take at least 20 million years for earth's ecosystems to recover. The sparrows, the cockroaches, the rats and the dandelions that like us are ecological weeds will probably survive us and their genetic pool will give rise to a new diversity. Perhaps in the future there will emerge something called sapience and sentience and Eons from now, future paleontologists will look at the evidence and wonder what happened to the planet. What caused such vast losses at six points in time: At the end of the Ordovician, in the late Devonian, at the end of the Permian, at the end of the Triassic, at the end of the Cretaceous, and again at about 65 million years later, in the late Quaternary, right around the time when the fossil record is mixed with the archeological record and one an dig bones alongside dugout canoes, stone axes, iron plows, three mast sailing ships, automobiles, fast food wrappings, television sets, bulldozers and chain saws.

As a Paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin was aware of extinctions. In fact, his more theoretical work seems propelled by the awareness of the deep loss inherent to extinction. And it might be that awareness that makes the work, as some critics have pointed out, too optimistic for the time. The optimism, however, stems from Teilhard de Chardin encompassing and generous vision, and if we look at it closer, it might help us understand the difference between Teilhard de Chardin and some of his followers. Because, whereas writers like Wright tend to be reductive in their attempt to reconcile Teilhard de Chardin's vision with the modern world, often equating the noosphere with the internet or global trade, thinkers like Lovelock as we have seen fail to follow Teilhard de Chardin all along Teilhard de Chardin, we think, would have agreed with many of Lovelock's premises. Nevertheless, he would have found one thing lacking. Lovelock's evolutionary clock begins to tick when Gaia begins to host molecules that polymerize. Teilhard de Chardin's evolutionary clock on the other hand began ticking with earlier than we can actually trace in the Big Bang.

As we have seen throughout the book the idea that the universe evolved somehow is still highly controversial. Physicists find the word evolution, when applied to cosmic history, too metaphorical, not specific enough. David Layzer has been one of the few scientists who actually has proposed a model for an evolving universe. In his book Cosmogenesis, he has argued rather cogently for a universe shaped by "creative" evolution. In Layzer's own words, we "live in a world of becoming as well as being, a world in which order emerged from chaos and begot new forms of order. The processes that have created and continue to create order obey universal and unchanging physical laws. Yet, because they generate information their outcomes are not implicit in their initial conditions."

Teilhard de Chardin's vision made evolution the shaping force of universal history and not merely of the history of the earth. Teilhard de Chardin's seeming optimism might stem from the fact that he granted such sweeping influence to evolution. The operative word here is seeming. Considering our circumstances, Teilhard de Chardin's ideas do seem optimistic. However our ecological circumstances are only a small speck as far Teilhard de Chardin's vision is concerned. In fact, we would like to argue that Teilhard de Chardin seems only optimistic if we refuse to read him in his own terms and his own terms involve a paradigmatic change in our way of thinking, for at its core, Teilhard de Chardin demands an epistemological shift.

This epistemological shift is akin to what Kant referred to as the sublime. For Kant the sublime was : "an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the no attainability of nature as a presentation of reason's ideas." What Kant posits is much simpler than his rather dense prose. In fact, his definition seems to synthesize many of the ideas which people before him posited about the concept of the sublime. Since Longinus, the first writer to actually articulate some of its basic definitions, the essential claim of the sublime is that humans can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human. What, if anything, lies beyond the human - God or the gods, the demon or Nature - is a matter left to each of the individual writers who have tackled the concept of the sublime. At the core of the sublime however, is the notion that there is something beyond human dimensions. In short, what the concept of the sublime has allowed for throughout the centuries has been a credible way to address what might be called "super human." By the time we get to Kant's definition of the sublime, the fact that transcendence beyond the human is at the core of the sublime is so internalized that Kant finds it unnecessary to mention it. Instead, he sees the way in which the sublime as a moment we experience, whether beholding a natural scene or something else beyond our explanation allows for an epistemological shift. Kant breaks the sublime into three stages. The first stage in the sublime, the mind is at a determinate relation to the object it beholds. This relation is habitual and more or less unconscious. This is the state of normal perception, where there is no dissonance or discrepancy between what is beheld and the way it is understood. There is in other words, a smooth correspondence between inner and outer. In the second stage, the habitual relation between mind and object suddenly breaks down. Surprise or astonishment is the up shot of this break down and there is a disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer. This occurs because the object which is beheld is in excess for the semantic capabilities of the mind. In science, this moment has often ushered revolutions. The geological record and the span of time it seemed to contain might be a good example. Similarly, the vastness of space and the eons of universal history that preceded us might be examples of object for which the mind seems not ready or equipped to understand. In the third and final stage of the Kantian sublime, we encounter what we have labeled as an epistemological shift, since the mind encounters new ways to understand. In fact, the third stage is characterized by the fact that the mind recovers the balance of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object so that the very indeterminacy that characterized the second stage is used here as a springboard for the mind to understand and articulate a transcendent order. In Kant's formulation, in other words, the object which causes the feeling of the sublime is internalized and as such is able to allow the mind to discover new ways of understanding.

Teilhard de Chardin would have never, of course, applied the idea of the sublime to his vision. His effort, as far as he was concerned, was purely scientific and skirted the philosophical as much as any other work of science does, by necessity only. But like the work of people like Einstein, which was if not deeply spiritual then spiritually inspired, questioning the universe not as a formula but as an object of wonder as the creation of a greater being, the work of Teilhard de Chardin is deeply concern with transcendence. Still, his work does not merely project awe at the creation but actually internalizes this awe and channels it to create a new understanding. We might say that the sublime moment in Teilhard de Chardin, the moment of awe might stem from Teilhard de Chardin's realization that evolution is not an accident that occurred in some isolated planet called Earth. The moment Teilhard de Chardin posits that evolution on earth is merely a fragment in a continuum that began in the Big Bang and which will continue with or with out us long into the future until the universe fulfills its function, Teilhard de Chardin demanded from himself as well as other scientists that we change not only the ways in which we do science, but the ways in which we know and understand, hence our claim: his work does demand an epistemological shift.

As we have seen previously, when the Big Bang theory was posited, many scientists rejected it. Nevertheless as it gained acceptance in theoretical circles, it forced research circles to refocus and refine their methods, so that they gradually were forced to either confirm or refute the theory. Teilhard de Chardin's ideas demand something similar at a much grander scale. Scientists who have criticized Teilhard de Chardin dismiss his work as teleological and anthropocentric. The latter accusation is of course a complete misreading of Teilhard de Chardin's work. To Teilhard de Chardin, the human is as far as he is concerned the greatest manifestation of evolution because it embodies the most complexity. At the same time, Teilhard de Chardin is aware that the human, like evolution on earth, is merely a step in long journey. The former accusation, the one that sees his work as teleological is actually correct. The trick which Teilhard de Chardin's critics have used is a semantic one. Anthropocentric and teleology are dirty words in contemporary parlance. Combined, they often imply that homo sapiens is the end of the teleology. Nothing could be further from the truth in de Chardin's method.

Teilhard de Chardin's teleology is much more complex than that. Homo Sapiens is not the aim of the universe. On the contrary, it is only a step in a rather long process. The aim of the teleology is nothing less that the Omega point. The Omega point is one of the concepts which Teilhard de Chardin coined and which has been widely adopted in the scientific community. The adoption has not always been accurate or true to the Teilhardian spirit. For Teilhard de Chardin, the Omega point is the ultimate synthesis, for it reconciles theology to the very scientific concept of the Big Crunch. For most scientists the big crunch is just another proof that the universe is pointless and arose by chance. Witness for instance the way Stephen Hawkins has over and over used the black hole as a small version of what will happen in the big crunch and the too many times that he has argued that information swallowed by a black hole would become noise. Teilhard de Chardin's vision is diametrically opposed to Hawkin. For him the Omega point is that point where the "reflective centers of the world ... effectively" converge.