Quotes from John F. Haught

A greedy insistence that the whole of nature and life must present itself to our voracious demand for instantaneous intelligibility is a symptom of all world-shrinking ideology, whether religiously fundamentalist or scientifically materialist. In

In us humans evolution has now become conscious of itself. We have the freedom to choose or reject opportunities to carry the evolutionary adventure into a new future. The fact that we don't always seem to be making much headway-and indeed often seem to be regressing-is not sufficient reason for discouragement.

A theory is a broad way of organizing and rendering intelligible the observable data uncovered by scientific exploration. And nothing becomes a scientific "fact" except in the context of an overarching theory. Theory is not something that dissolves or disappears once we get to the "facts." It abides as the intelligible context in which all facts are identified as such.

See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence.13

Teilhard shared with Whitehead, for example, the conviction that our own mental activity is an aspect of nature, not something that occurs outside of nature.

Teilhard says we must be ready to "try everything." This hope requires a more adventurous moral life than what we find in classical religious patterns of piety, but Teilhard was looking for a morality rooted in hope—not only for humanity but for the whole universe. His attention to the cosmos and its future can cause confusion to theologians of "the eternal present" who have not yet fully awakened to the fact of an unfinished universe.