Creation Moment 12/19/2015 - Evolution, "Mother Earth" & Francis

But there were false prophets also among the people,

even as there shall be false teachers among you,

who privily shall bring in damnable heresies,....

..And many shall follow their pernicious ways;

2 Peter 2:1,2

"There is a clear shift here from Pope John Paul. Yet Pope Benedict still relies on an anthropocentric ethic of "wise use" of nature. Perhaps he was wary that talking about nature's inherent goodness might open him to the charge of neopaganism from conservative factions within the church.
Pope Francis doesn't seem to have such reservations. Indeed, following Francis of Assisi, he invokes "Mother Earth" in the opening paragraph of the encyclical. Pope Francis also shifts the church to a view of nature in line with environmental science and environmental philosophy. He calls for great ecological literacy and understanding of environmental problems. He has left the earlier biblical language of domination for an understanding of integral ecology that connects humans to their environment and to the whole evolutionary process.
Indeed, in this respect there are echoes in the encyclical of the

influence of two progressive Catholic thinkers of the 20^th century, namely, the scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) and the cultural historian Thomas Berry (1914–2009). Both of these thinkers saw the "grammar of nature" as reflecting an evolutionary unfolding of Earth's ecosystems.

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and paleontologist whose thinking about the place of humans in evolution led to his exile from Europe to China in the late 1920s. Of particular import is Teilhard's understanding of evolution that he saw being driven by life's "zest." Teilhard wrote: "A zest for living…would appear to be the fundamental driving force which impels and directs the universe along its main axis of complexity-consciousness…"

Pope Francis has drawn on the same notion to describe a dynamic ecological relationship of humans with Earth's evolution. There are echoes also of cultural historian, Thomas Berry, who situated the human as arising from, and dependent on, this long evolutionary journey. Berry writes:

At such a moment, a new revolutionary experience is needed, an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of Earth’s process. This awakening is our human participation in the dream of Earth...

From this cosmological perspective Berry calls on humans to participate in the Great Work of transformation–building new


Painting of Teilhard de Chardin

ecological economics, new educational and political systems, and new religious and spiritual communities that are aligned with Earth's capacities and limits.

It is this evolutionary understanding of Earth's systems, so central to Teilhard and Berry, that provides a larger context for the Pope's own revolutionary thinking. Indeed, this is also the perspective of Journey of the Universe, which narrates the epic story of evolution in film and book form and shows the implications of this story for environmental living in the Conversations." Solutions