President Michael D. Higgins President Michael D. Higgins in his speech at the BT Young Scientist &Technology Exhibition promoted the thinking of Jesuit scientist and theologian/mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as an example of the potential interplay of science and ethics.
“Science offers great possibilities that have a pivotal role to play and, at its best, in responding to the great humanitarian challenges of our time, and has the potential to make an essential contribution to understanding, sustaining and making our world more fulfilling for us all in peaceful co-existence with nature and each other.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw this as being achievable but through little less than a species evolution in human consciousness” the President stated.
He later added: “We are all paying the price for the absence of that evolved consciousness, of which Teilhard de Chardin wrote, that would lead to an international politics that enabled the sharing of such scientific and technological discovery. This would require that governments, citizens and corporations work together, co-operate with real meaning and purpose, with the aim of ensuring that the fruits of science contribute solutions to the great global, social, economic and ecological challenges that we all face on our burning planet.”