Are We Developing Consciousness? or Worshipping Technology? with Don Viney (Part 2)

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Robert Nicastro continues his conversation with philosopher Don Viney. Together, they explore Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a planetary mind—asking whether today’s global networks are cultivating consciousness and love, or tempting us to worship technology for its own sake.

What happens when tools eclipse persons? When CGI and AI overwhelm story and relationship? Viney contrasts spectacle with narrative and argues that technology should serve the growth of consciousness—embodiment, compassion, and responsibility—rather than replace it. He also pushes back on disembodied transhumanist dreams, advocating for a deeply human path forward.

Later in the episode, Robert and Don turn to “building the earth,” love as the axis of evolution, and a daring theology of the “not-yet”—where God’s actuality grows in relationship with the world. Along the way, they consider citizenship of the universe and Teilhard’s incandescent hope that humanity might one day “master the energies of love.”

ABOUT DON VINEY

“True love unites in such a way as to augment rather than to diminish the personalities of those caught in its Fire.”

Donald Wayne Viney, Ph.D. received degrees in philosophy from Colorado State University (1977) and the University of Oklahoma (1979, 1982). He is a three-time recipient of the title “University Professor” at Pittsburg State University (Kansas) where he taught from 1984 until his retirement in 2022. He is the author of Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God (1985), senior editor of Hartshorne’s Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom (2011), and co-author, with George W. Shields, of The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination (2020). He has written extensively on the nineteenth century Breton philosopher, Jules Lequyer, and published two books of translations of Lequyer’s writings. In addition, he is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and reviews on a variety of topics, including six articles on Teilhard de Chardin and an annotated translation of Marcel Brion’s 1951 interview with Teilhard. He serves on the editorial boards of Process Studies and the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy. Viney is also a singer-songwriter.

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness. I'm Robert Nicastro, continuing my conversation with Don Viney, philosopher and longtime scholar of Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In part one, we explored how humans might take the reins of our own evolution. But how exactly? Does global technology bring us closer to peace, love, and compassion? Today, we turn to the emerging planetary mind. Are we cultivating consciousness or worshipping technology? And later, Don shares some of Teilhard's most inspiring insights.

Do you think we're in the midst of realizing Teilhard's vision of a planetary mind, or are we distorting it?

Don: Oh, wow. Short answer, I don't know. Maybe a less flippant answer would be, yeah, I think in some sense there is a planetary mind developing. It's amazing to me, just in my short lifetime, okay, I'm 72 years old, but in my lifetime, I wrote my dissertation on a manual typewriter for crying out loud, literal cut and paste. I thought I would really reach the pinnacle of word processing if I could get a Selectric typewriter in the 1980s. I had no clue that computers were around the corner. I really didn't understand that. My wife, incidentally, did understand that—she's in information systems—and then the internet itself as it develops. 

So now here we are because of the internet. We're talking over the space. I'm not sure where you are in the world right now. Here I am in Southeast Kansas, and you're on the East Coast someplace, or Eastern Standard Time. And here we're talking back and forth to each other. I talked to my wife's relatives in Germany and in Ireland and in England, or my own friends in France, just like that. Translation programs have become unbelievably sophisticated. I used to test the translation programs, especially in the 90s. And there was one phrase that I would use to test. It's a French phrase, "Passer la nuit blanche." And it means to spend a sleepless night. But literally, it's to spend a white night, nuit blanche. And originally when I would type that in, it would mistake N-U-I-T, nuit, as a conjugation of the verb, nuit, to deny, and I would get these nonsense sentences. “To spend a deny white.” You know, it didn't know what to do. Lately, I did it again. No problem, it understands colloquialisms. So it's not perfect, I've found mistakes, but it's ever increasingly getting better. And now they have these little devices you can carry around and translate with people. So the interconnections that we have, to me, are astounding. Is it okay to say a planetary mind? It's certainly more interconnected than it used to be.

Robert: The core of Teilhard's project is asking the question, "Is this leading us to greater consciousness, greater love?" So how would you distinguish between whether technology is leading us toward greater consciousness or are we just worshiping technology?

Don: What I would like to see maybe a sort of an operational way of looking at the operational definitions. How are we treating CGI in films? I was talking to a relative here last month about the film "Casablanca" saying there was no CGI there. You know, their special effects were primitive. But what a story, what a story. In the first Jurassic Park movie, one incredible science fiction story, at least plausible in many respects. CGI didn't take it over. It was a good story. So I think the more that we can think in terms of narratives and of life stories that have our interconnections and allow AI and artificial intelligence and our technology to enhance those, the more that we can do what Teilhard said in building the earth. 

But as you say, if we become too fascinated by the technology itself, that leads to, you know, in my example of films that are just a bunch of artificially created images and no real storyline. It bothers me that there are so many films like that. I think it's a bad sign. I want to see more storylines where the technology is enhancing the human relationships or the story rather than taking over the story.

Robert: So this notion, I didn't say it well before, but you gave me some time to think. I can say it a little better now. This notion of technology in service of consciousness rather than we being the persons who worship technology itself. I think that was the, the core of Teilhard's enterprise, constantly making sure, recognizing that technology is great because it can extend the human person in this interconnected mind, but when it no longer is in service of more being, more love, more compassion, more unity, it's in effect detracting us from this divine evolutionary impulse that we're required to be attentive to, or at least lured to be attentive to, to use a Whiteheadian phrase.

Don: And Robert, you know, another thing is we're fascinated by parades, you know, military parades. So we watch, I mean, the French do it, the Russians do it. We've done it recently in Washington where you parade these big weapons and big machines through. I wish we could get as excited about a parade of say the history of the telephone or the time writer or the internet. You know, these are things that you don't parade the streets, but we should be just as excited about that as we are about the weapons that we use to harm one another. Even though, you know, we say that we have these to protect ourselves, but I don't feel safer because of them, frankly.

Robert: Teilhard in this sense, we're championing Teilhard as a person who still values embodiment even in the midst of utilizing technology to extend human personhood and advance the evolutionary process. But many in the transhumanist movement or in Silicon Valley call upon Teilhard as a patron saint and use him as an example of what it means to excise consciousness from the human body and maybe transcend our biological limits. 

Do you see Teilhard as an intellectual ancestor of transhumanism as it's being conceived today in terms of those philosophical movements? Or would you recognize Teilhard using a different sense of what they might be conflating in terms of how we transcend and transform the human condition?

Don: Well, that's a really good question. I would see him as advocating our embodiment, not thinking in terms of our own, say, immortality by taking your consciousness somehow, somehow taking your consciousness out of your body and putting it in a machine. I'm inclined to think that that's a kind of fanciful way of thinking. It's true, we've got machines that are amazing in what they can do. And we can even begin to think about replacing, I mean, we've already replaced body parts. The heart is a pump, and so you can make an artificial heart. And so, medical technology has done wondrous things. 

But ultimately, I don't think that technology is going to take us away from our embodiment. And I'm not even sure you want to take away from embodiment. I mean, our sexuality is a tide for embodiment and we enjoy that a great deal. Sometimes we use it to harm other people, but it's an enjoyable thing to have a body and to use that body in ways that are loving. So I don't see us transcending that. Maybe we'll live longer. I don't know. I hope I want to live better, not longer. I really, this is what I'm very interested in. I would like to live longer, but as long as I can live better, what's his name? Jonathan Swift talked about living forever and what that actually might involve, especially if you become more and more decrepit, not a good thing. So no, I would, to answer your question, I do not see him as someone who might be advocating that kind of disembodiment.

Robert: And what you also said, Don, you used, maybe you did this intentionally or not, but the The language of love came up in that response and Teilhard believed, as you know, that love is the axis of evolution. What do you think, in terms of this conversation about embodiment, the world would look like if we actually learned to harness love as the full powerful energy source of evolution?

Don: What would the world look like? You want me to speculate on a utopian world?

Robert: Or for instance, we can even try to make this a little bit more particular for the sake of managing this question. If Teilhard were alive today, how do you think he would encourage us to harness love for a world in AI and climate crisis? What direction would that take?

Don: I would think that he would emphasize human relationships once again, and to whatever extent possible relationship, you know, to encourage people to connect themselves to the universe of which they are a part, to see themselves maybe not as children of God if they have trouble with the word God, but as children of this universe, as citizens of this universe. You know, at some point he says to one of his correspondents, which one is it? I think it might be his sister, where he says, I can't remember who it was. He says, "I'm striving not to be a Frenchman, a Chinaman, I'm striving to be a terrestrian." I think it's what he says. But ultimately he wants to be a citizen of the universe. 

And I agree with Hartshorne that when you carry that out, that kind of relationship thinking out, it ends up being a vision of God. I'm not going to try to force that on somebody by any means, but I would think that that's where Teilhard would be. When he talks about building the earth, he says that the age of nations has passed and the task before us now is if we would not perish is to build the earth. Beautiful statement.

Robert: If we are building the earth, is God building it with us? Or is God in some sense coming into being through our building? Next, I ask Don how he unpacks this profound question. Who is the not-yet God? And can we really love what is not yet? Finally, Don shares his take on Teilhard's most inspiring insight. 

Is there something about, because building the earth, constructing the future, God in it all, I know you gave us that wonderful distinction that Hartshorne uses in his works between God's existence and God's actuality. Is there something in Teilhard's vision that sees God as not yet? There's something about God that even beyond experience perhaps is in development or love that's becoming ever more expansive as God seeks to become more involved relationally with the world?

Don: I don't remember the exact language, even though I was reading about it just about a half an hour ago, where he talks about God being completed by the world, and we being completed by God. There's that relationship again. That absolutely means that there are aspects of God not yet that are real, because there is that constant interaction, that give and take, that relationship. I sometimes think, I was listening to, this morning, to Beethoven's, the Concerto, the Emperor Concerto, and I was thinking, I'm so glad I lived after Beethoven. So glad I lived after Beethoven, also Mozart. I'm glad that I live in this time, and yet, maybe a century hence, people will be saying the same thing about the great people in our day. 

So there's constantly something new under the sun. As I've often said, even the sun itself one time was new. And because of human relationships, we need each other and God even, Teilhard says, "God even needs us for the completion of God's reality." And that's a very radical way of speaking for a lot of people that say, "Why does, you know, the ancient Greeks didn't think the gods needed anything." And we've taken that over, unfortunately. But happily, we have people like Abraham Heschel and Teilhard de Chardin and Charles Hartshorne to tell us, no, maybe God does, you know, what does Abraham Heschel says? He says, we're so preoccupied with trying to find God. We don't realize God's trying to find us.

Robert: And the reason I asked, even asked that question, Don, is because somebody put to me one time, "Well, you say that there's something about God that's not yet. Well, how could we possibly fall in love with the not-yet?" And doesn't that kind of put us right back into that abstraction mode again? And my response was very brief, and maybe it was undeveloped. In fact, it probably still is, but it was simply this, that even when we're in love with one another, we're always loving someone into their fullest potential. We're loving what they are and how we're experiencing them, but we're also loving what they can become because we know they're more than what just meets the eye. We know that there is something greater to them that has yet to be tapped into. It's not saying that this person is not intrinsically good, it's saying there's always something more that can be illuminated in this personhood. I mean, Teilhard used the language union differentiates. become more of who we are personally when we're together and learning about one another?

Don: I would say that we're always falling in love with the not yet. I want to learn how to play Blackbird on my guitar. I love that. So I'll work on it. I was listening to my granddaughter sing. My daughter sent me a video of my granddaughter singing and playing the piano at an event. She lives in Texas. I was just brought to tears. That's not—yeah, and I see this potential in this young woman. I think she can be a great singer if she wants to be. Basically, she can be a great vet if she wants to be. But I fall in love with her potential because I care about her. And the things we care about, if we care about anything, we ought to care about the future. And well, and we also ought to care about the way that we're using the past. My father is working on a paper called "Zombies from the Past." I never thought dad would write a paper with zombies in the title. He's a psychologist. But he's talking about zombie laws, actually, laws that are still in the books that may be harmful if they're enacted or if they're taken too seriously. And these laws are on the books, and they stay there, and nobody thinks to get rid of them. But also, just more generally, the question how do we use the past to form what the future will be? So I think that, and that is also a question of the not yet, actually, because even though it's about the past, it's about the way we use the past and the future. So I think all of those questions are important to forming a future that's livable for everyone.

Robert: In your opinion of all Teilhard's insights, from consciousness driving evolution to Omega to love as the primal energy of the universe, what do you think is the contribution the world most needs to embrace today?

Don: Oh, what's the one? Well, it just doesn't get any better than what he said to Lucille Swan, you know, in a letter to her, not a letter to her, but in an essay that he wrote that was really because of his love for her. You know, "The day will come when, after we've mastered the tides and the space and gravitation, we'll master the energies of love for God, and then for a second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire." That is such a beautiful statement. That for me maybe strikes at the heart of what's most important about Teilhard, the emphasis on love, the emphasis on human relationships, the emphasis on the future. All of that is just so beautiful. 

We can also take his personal example. This is where I'm going to insert a mention of Merce Prats. I didn't know where I was going to put that. She has written a couple of books and several articles on Teilhard de Chardin, and she wrote a biography of Teilhard. She wrote a book called, let's see, this is a picture of it, Une parole attendue—”The Awaited Word” basically. That book is about his own struggle with getting his ideas out in the midst of a recalcitrant church. They didn't want him to publish anything of the religious philosophical nature. He walked a fine line. I mean, he could have been censured. That book is just amazing. I hope it gets translated into English because everybody interested in Teilhard should read it. 

But taking his personal example, oh, and then there will then this other book, this is the biography. They're both excellent books, just lots of good archival work and interviews that she's done, and she writes really well. But his personal story is something that I think some of us, I know I take inspiration from when I think of all of the difficulties he overcame, the fact that he was able to maintain optimism in the face of so much resistance. You know, she says, Mersa Prat says at one point, did he have to die in order for his words to survive? And in one sense, maybe that's true. Maybe he did because they couldn't be published until after he died. But thank goodness they were, or we wouldn't be talking about it right now. So his own example of traveling the world, the way he saw the world, I never cease to be amazed at the stories I read about the man. 

There's this one, let me read you this, because I ran this off for a geologist friend of mine. This is an anecdote from 1940. Each afternoon Teilhard and Pierre Loire took their tea with Lucille Swan and on Sundays they went with some group on a picnic in the western hills. While Loire sat on the grass and talked or helped his host in serving, the tireless Teilhard climbed the hills like a mountain goat. Loire says, "If I had tried to keep up with him, it would have killed me." He was chipping away at the rocks with his little hammer. More than once when the bespeckled Paul Raphael, himself a mineralogist, went to fetch him back for lunch, he found Teilhard perched on a steep grade hillside like some strange bird staring intently at pebbles in his hand. One day, as Raphael commented on the depth of his concentration, Teilhard explained, smiling, "To me, these stones are living things." 

That is such a beautiful story, stones as living things. Of course, they're not literally alive, but he saw the process, he saw the development, his geological eyes saw that. To see the world through those kinds of eyes, that lens of that expansive time, it is so, for me, it's just liberating. I was recently in Ireland on the West Coast last September, and I'd never been there before. I was looking at the curvature of the rocks and the way that the stones are piled up on one another, and that came to my mind. Also a statement by another geologist who said that are not nouns, they are verbs. And Teilhard would have understood that. So his person, it's not just his ideas that are liberating, I find his whole way of seeing the world liberating. And indeed, as you know, that's the way he begins the human phenomenon, the book. He talks about voir, to see. What does it mean to see things? There's so much involved in that. And since I'm a part-time musician, I would say to hear things as well.

Robert: For those who may have been inspired by this conversation and want to dig more deeply into your work, Don, where would you lead them?

Don: Well, okay, so I did publish two things with Teilhard Studies. One, you told me you read, the one that's Across the Gulf of 700 Years. And then there's an earlier one, not so many years ago, about the varieties of process theology and showing how Teilhard fits in with that one. Or fits in with Hartshorne and Whitehead. And then, I mean, there's a few other articles. One of these days, maybe I need to write a book about it. Just pull all this stuff together and write it. I've also got a piece in that book where you have an article on Whitehead and Teilhard Organism to Omega book. So if they want to read my stuff, those are places you could go.

Robert: They're all very good pieces, for sure. I know that I drew just a personal self-disclosure for my own dissertation. I wrote on Teilhard's hyperphysics as a new metaphysics of the 21st century, and I really leaned on a lot of your work. So really, I thank you for your own wisdom and scholarship. They have been truly illuminating to me, and I know for our listeners too, they'll get quite a bit of meaning out of this conversation. So I thank you for joining us, Don. This was really enriching.

Don: I love talking to you. Thank you. And thanks for having me on.

Robert: It was a privilege to join Don Viney for this deep dive into Teilhard de Chardin. Next time, Ilia returns with Rev. Dr. Hilary Raining. A special thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute and the team at the Center for Christogenesis. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.