Editing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (section)

===Peter Medawar===
In 1961, British immunologist and Nobel laureate [[Peter Medawar]] wrote a scornful review of ''The Phenomenon of Man'' for the journal ''[[Mind (journal)|Mind]]'': "the greater part of it [...] is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. [...] Teilhard practiced an intellectually unexacting kind of science [...]. He has no grasp of what makes a logical argument or what makes for proof. He does not even preserve the common decencies of scientific writing, though his book is professedly a scientific treatise. [...] Teilhard habitually and systematically cheats with words [...], uses in metaphor words like energy, tension, force, impetus, and dimension as if they retained the weight and thrust of their special scientific usages. [...] It is the style that creates the illusion of content."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Medawar |first=P.&nbsp;B. |author-link=Peter Medawar |year=1961 |title=Critical Notice |url=http://bactra.org/Medawar/phenomenon-of-man.html |journal=[[Mind (journal)|Mind]] |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |volume=70 |issue=277 |pages=99–106 |doi=10.1093/mind/LXX.277.99}}</ref>

In 2014, Donald Wayne Viney evaluated Medawar's review and concluded that the case made against Teilhard was "remarkably thin, marred by misrepresentations and elementary philosophical blunders."<ref>Viney, Donald Wayne, "Teilhard, Medawar, and the New Atheism," in Ilia Delio ed., ''From Teilhard To Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe''. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2014, p. 128.</ref> These defects, Viney noted, were uncharacteristic of Medawar's other work.

In another response, [[John Allen Grim]] said when Teilhard "wrote The Phenomenon of Man … he was using science there in a very broad sense. What he was really looking for was to be actually more radically empirical than conventional science is. Conventional science leaves out so much that's really there, especially our own subjectivity and some of the other things that are qualitative and value laden that are going on in the world. That science … has abstracted from values, meaning, subjectivity, purpose, God, and talked only about physical causation. Teilhard knew this, because when he wrote his [science journal] papers, he didn't bring God, value and so forth into it. But when he wrote The Phenomenon, he was doing something different. But it's not against the spirit of science. It was to actually expand the empirical orientation of science to take into account things that science unfortunately leaves out, like consciousness, for example, which today, in a materialist worldview, doesn't even exist, and yet it's the most palpable experience that any of us has. So if you try to construct a worldview that leaves out something so vital and important as mind to subjectivity, then that's unempirical, that's irrelevant. What we need is a radically empirical approach to the world that includes within what he calls hyperphysics, the experience of consciousness and also the experiences of faith, religions.”<ref>{{Citation |title=Teilhard de Chardin: His Importance in the 21st Century | date=23 June 2015 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnCQHIeucNw |access-date=2023-12-19 |language=en}}</ref>