More Dr. Michael Nicholson goodness on his favorite atheists series! Check out last week’s pre-Camus for an introduction to the series.
Thomas Nagel (1937 – )
Thomas Nagel had me at, “I confess to an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard the design alternative as a real option. I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables—indeed compels—so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling” (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, p. 12). Whether Nagel, a philosophy professor at New York University, truly lacks a sensus divinitatis is a theological question I won’t take up right now. I also won’t take up the argument against the claim that a human design intuition-inference is ungrounded (I think it is well-grounded in a properly chastened common-sense realism). What I find refreshing is Nagel’s candid confession that his purchase of a materialist-atheist worldview is a leveraged buy-out in which he brings no equity at all to the deal. I have found the frequent personal claim of many atheists—those in the public eye and ones I have met—that they have carefully examined all the evidence and come to a completely rational objective conclusion that there is no God, to be a wearying form of denial and confirmation bias. I once invited the president of our local atheists club to speak to my Christian High School Worldviews class on the subject, “Why I am an Atheist”. From earlier conversations I knew he was raised as a conservative Baptist, and that a short while into his post-college career his first wife had died a difficult death of cancer. Yet he never openly factored this into an explanation of his decision to embrace the absence of God. I considered it insensitive to bring this up in the class, but my 12th grade students quite easily poked several holes in his allegedly rational reasons, and to no avail
Nagel will have none of this. In the concluding essay —“Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion”—of his book The Last Word, he writes, “I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear [of religion]. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” Nagel’s transparent self-awareness goes even deeper. He admits he has a “cosmic authority problem” and that many other materialists have it, too. He believes this cosmic authority problem is responsible for “scientism and reductionism” and that it “supports… the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind” (see here).
It is his substantial and sustained objection to materialist Darwinian reductionism with respect to the human mind and consciousness that has driven much of Nagel’s philosophy, and has made him persona non grata with the Dawkinsian branch of reductionist-scientistic atheism (see here). Nagel started down this path with his influential essay, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” (1974), here), a query about the subjective experience of consciousness, and the impossibility of reducing such experience to physical phenomena as understood within the standard materialist-atheist paradigm. Nearly 40 years later, Nagel specifically takes up his cudgel against “materialist neo-Darwinism” in Mind and Cosmos: “Something more [than the laws of physics and chemistry] is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures” (M & C, p. 20). Yet, as I noted, Nagel rejects out-of-hand any divine design explanation because, as he admits, he doesn’t want there to be a God. He argues instead that, because rudimentary consciousness is one of the “already existing properties of the fundamental particles”, and because the laws that govern matter and the unfolding of the cosmos have a “nonpurposive teleology [?!]”, there is an inevitable “path that leads toward… the existence of living, and ultimately of conscious, organisms” (M & C, pp. 61, 67). This “third way” alternative—a combination of an Aristotelian natural law teleology and almost panpsychism—will likely appeal to few.
I must admit to a certain paternalistic attitude toward Nagel, like a father silently watching a child who insists on mastering a difficult skill with no parental input. I can’t help thinking, “You almost got it! If you could just get over your ‘cosmic authority’ problem!” Yet, Nagel’s atypical atheist humility in confessing his “belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts” (“Bat”) reminds me that I frequently need to remove the logs from my own theologically constructive eye.
COMMENTS
5 responses to “These Are a Few of My Favorite Atheists: Thomas Nagel”
Leave a Reply
By substantiating Hume’s aphorism that reason is the slave of the passions, Nagel simultaneously demonstrates that knowledge alone cannot save. May God remove his heart of stone and sweep him up into the sphere of new creation where his insight can at last serve the chief end of man.
I wonder what kind of God-concept Nagel has. Of course you have a divine authority problem if you concept of God is this moralistic dictator and cosmic world police that so many religious traditions portray God to be. The loving holy Trinity manifested in forgiving Christ is totally different kind of a deity.
That is a very good question, Matti. Maybe the best question. And I don’t know the answer (Nagel doesn’t specify the attributes of the God he does not believe in, the way many atheists do, at least not in my readings of his work). But I do know the gamut of God rejection goes from Miltonian fist-shaking better-to-reign-in-Hell-than-serve-in-Heaven implacable hostility through the anger of disappointment (God as the perennial let-down) to “God would just interfere with my personal plans”. I just don’t know where Nagel would fall on that spectrum.
Loving this approach! Thanks for sharing! You