Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the paleoanthropologist and Roman Catholic priest who advocated a doctrine of cosmic evolution, was born in Sarcenat, France. At the age of eighteen he entered the Jesuit order, and he remained a faithful member of it for the rest of his life. By the time he was ordained, his interest in science and the reading of Henri Bergson resulted in his becoming a fervent evolutionist. Association with the Bergsonian scholar Édouard Le Roy also deeply influenced his thought. It became one of Teilhard's aims to show that evolutionism does not entail a rejection of Christianity. He likewise sought to convince the church that it can and should accept the implications of the revolution begun by Charles Darwin, but he met with uniform opposition from ecclesiastical superiors.

In 1926 he was expelled from the Catholic Institute in Paris...