Acceso usuarios
João Barbosa
This article focuses on the Omega Point, an essential concept in Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary metaphysics. In certain passages about the Omega Point, Teilhard mentions the primeval atom hypothesis, a theory about the beginning of the universe proposed by Georges Lemaître, another contemporary Jesuit priest who was also a scientist. Although Teilhard and Lemaître are essentially evolutionists, besides being Jesuit priests, their evolutionary metaphysics and their philosophies of science are radically divergent, and two important differences are presented here – about the eventual cosmic determinism and about the relationship between scientific knowledge and religious beliefs. This article also shows how Teilhard’s original concept was projected into two cosmological theories in which it reveals an essential transfiguration by losing its initial anthropic and religious matrix – the cosmological anthropic principle, proposed by physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler, and the Omega Point Theory proposed later by Frank Tipler.
