Thomas Nagal, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

Oxford University Press, 2012, pgs. 130.

Summary:  Thomas Nagal (1937-     ) is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University and has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. He is an avid atheist (12).

According to Nagal, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and realist values (values based on a standard outside of the self) require that the materialism of Neo-Darwinism is very likely false. Evolution is true, but reductionist materialism is false, and the Neo-Darwinian juggernaut really needs to get over this and come up with a better theory.

He even says shocking things like:

I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science (7).

And:

Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts [intelligent design folks] pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair (10).

Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine—that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law—cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis (11).

Nagal at this point has Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Plotinus, pre-Christian and post-Christian Augustine, all the Scholastic theologians/philosophers from 500 AD to the present, Averroes, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Dr. Marjorie Grene (cf. review on Heidegger), historian Gertrud Himmelfarb, and a swath of modern philosophers, the Buddha, and . . . all nodding their heads. Thus, Nagal does not add anything to the historical conversation.

Nagal’s contribution is found in that he is willing to actually say to moderns, “Umm, (polite cough), Neo-Darwinism’s materialism, is very unlikely to be true.” Speaking very quickly. “But I am not a theist. So, please don’t take away my intelligentsia union card. But I just want to point out that because the concept of evolution is non-material a reductionist material explanation of the universe is absurd. Further, merely material things can’t produce non-material things, so we’ve got to have a theory that includes non-material things in it or we can’t have non-material thing like the concept of evolution, consciousness, reason, values, ‘cause otherwise were all just bags of wet chemicals with interior skeletons twitching to environmental stimuli.”

And now I will stop being snarky, and attempt a degree of sobriety since both Nagal and I are exposed to the above mentioned browbeating.

Nagal politely points out that there are only three kinds of accounts of existence: “causal (appealing only to law-governed efficient causation)” {58}, teleological—“a teleological account will hold that in addition to the law governing the behavior of the elements in every circumstance, there are also principles of self-organization or of the development of complexity that are not explained by those elemental laws” (59), and intentional, God using his free will to either create or manipulate the existing.

Nagal doesn’t explain why he rejects the intentional account besides, “I lack the sensus divinitatis” (12) and suggests in the footnote he’s been grumpy about theism in the past: “I am not just unreceptive but strongly averse to the idea, as I have said elsewhere” (12, ftn. 10).

He does seem a bit irked by the fact that most forms of theism require “that the divine mind just has to be accepted as a stopping point in the pursuit of understanding, it leaves the process incomplete. . .” (21). 

The complaint here seems to be that if there is a personal God then we can’t comprehend him nor will we ever be able to, and that would put limits on human knowledge. Satan of course mentions this same issue in Genesis 3.

He then goes on to argue for the teleological explanation but without the baggage of deity. Instead we get statements like “the process seems to be one of the universe gradually waking up” (117).

The basic alternative he offers to mere materialism is a sort of panpsychism. Inherent in the universe is the potential for consciousness:

And once there are beings who can respond to value, the rather different teleology of intentional action becomes part of the historical picture, resulting in the creation of new value. The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future—though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively (124).

In other words, an unintelligent, unintentional, determined, panpsychic cosmos had a teleological non-intent that organized something (perhaps things) that are now intelligent, intentional, and can create stuff with their free-wills.

Though Nagal pays lip service to the possibility of aliens, he’s never met one. So, humans and their offspring are the only reasonable, value laden, free-causes in the universe. They have the potential for infinite understanding. Thus, the universe woke up in that it produced little gods. The little gods working collectively or individually can now steer the cosmos with their consciousness, knowledge, and choices. We can become what Nagal rejects as our cause. 

Benefits/Detriments:

While I have great appreciation for Nagal’s bravery, iconoclasm, and fortitude (one can only imagine the distaste he has for being quoted by Baptist pastors in sermons and blogs), he doesn’t add anything particularly interesting to the conversation in argumentation, besides pointing out that intelligent design arguments cannot be rejected out of hand. 

He seems very intelligent and I think he represents a more rational and humane philosophy than say Heidegger on an ethicist who is a materialist. What he’s observing has been patently obvious since before Socrates rejected a form of evolution because of the distance of his nose from his rectum (Xenophon, Memoirs of Socrates, 1.4.4-11). His panpsychism is no improvement on Hegel or Spinoza, and I suspect Aristotle would have been at best bemused by such a weakly formed teleology. 

My greatest hope for this book is that Nagal wrote it so shallowly as a heuristic device for scientists. May all his materialist readers have existential crises!  But as Nagal notes in closing, “The human will to believe is inexhaustible” (128).

Recommended for materialists.