Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There Is Another Way

Is the self-aware, socially-oriented, language-using, persistently interpretive faculty that we call the human mind a product of the evolution of random chemical, biological and quantum physical processes, or is it the result of an act of a divine being? This is the intellectual choice as it is presented in popular debate: religion or science. But suppose that neither religion nor science can account for the facts as we known them. Suppose that the intransigence of the human mind to explanation by psychophysical reduction or by ‘intelligent design’ are both fundamentally defective. Is there a reasonable alternative programme of investigation?

Thomas Nagel believes that there is. And he makes a good case. Nagel, who is an eminent philosopher of science considers that religious opposition to reductionist science has done human thought a service by correctly identifying flaws in current scientific arguments which would be unrecognised without that opposition. It appears, in Nagel’s view, that religious belief is provoking a new kind of Enlightenment, an exposure of the pretensions and contradictions of a dominant but inadequate mode of thinking. Whether he us right or not is far less interesting to me than the novelty of the argument. It is both refreshing and revealing.

The premise of Nagel’s approach is that what we call ‘mind’ is not an incidental by-product of the emergence and development of life but the central event of existence. That is to say that not just living things but all existing things are directed by purpose. This is called teleology and involves a very different analysis of the way the universe actually is, its ‘order’, than the standard categories of cause and effect. The teleological presumption is that the universe and all its components develop not like billiard balls bouncing off each other until they fall into a pocket but like the human imagination which continuously explores, interprets and integrates itself with the cosmos.

Teleology is not a new idea. Aristotle considered it an important method of analysis. But since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, teleology has been ignored as a general explanatory idea except in theological circles. Only by a few scientist-theologians has the teleological tradition been taken at all seriously. One of these, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, identified the creation of what he called the noösphere, the environment of the spirit, as the purposeful objective of cosmic development. For his innovative and elegantly beautiful thought he was, of course, shunned by his fellow scientists and condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church.

Teleology on the scale of the universe is not easy to keep separate from religious belief. It nevertheless does not imply a religious orientation. This is what got Teilhard into trouble with his ecclesiastical superiors (and long before him, Spinoza and Joachim of Flores among others). On the other hand the dominant conception, ideology really, of universal cause and effect is held by many scientists with what amounts to religious fervour. Nagel does a good job of navigating between the Scylla of fundamentalist doctrine and the Charybdis of scientistic ideology. It is a fascinating journey that any intelligent mind would benefit by taking. One can only hope that Nagel has a better reception than Teilhard among such minds.

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