I have been a fan of Thomas Nagel since I first read his
essay “What It’s like To Be a Bat”.
His lucid, common sense analysis was striking to me as an undergraduate
philosophy student. I was
therefore intrigued about his latest book – Mind
and Cosmos, especially since there was such a furor surrounding it. There has been much talk, well in
certain circles, about Mind and Cosmos.
In the debates between theists and non-theists, Nagel’s book
has lauded by the theist side for championing their cause, and treated
as a dangerous betrayal by nontheists. (1) But I think the book is neither. Sure the subtitle, Why
the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,
may lead you to think that he has landed firmly in the camp of theism, but I
think that would be to go too far.
We have to keep in mind that just because Nagel holds neo-Darwinism to
be false doesn’t mean that he believes theism is true. Nagel makes it more than clear that he
is not a theist, he just doesn’t want to base his atheism on something he
considers to be false. And that
indeed is laudable.
So what has caused all the fuss? Nagel claims in Mind
and Cosmos that the dominant naturalistic worldview, which holds that a
blind process of natural selection is responsible for our existence, is
fundamentally flawed. It should
also be noted that he mentions his doubts on the likelihood the ability of
purely physical laws to explain the origin of self-reproducing life forms, and
the likelihood of natural selection producing the life forms we see today in
the available geological time. (2) However, the first sticking point for Nagel comes in his
area of specialty – philosophy of mind. Essentially, he holds that the project
to reduce the mind to physical properties has failed because of the intractable
problem of explaining consciousness.
