The Weekly Standard has a compelling story highlighting philosopher Thomas Nagel and his rejection by fellow atheists for questioning materialism. The article, cleverly titled “The Heretic,” appears here. It begins by noting how Nagel found himself so despised by his colleagues:
Thomas Nagel is a prominent and heretofore respected member of the country’s intellectual elite. And such men are not supposed to write books with subtitles like the one he tacked onto Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Imagine if your local archbishop climbed into the pulpit and started reading from the Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. “What has gotten into Thomas Nagel?” demanded the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, on Twitter. (Yes, even Steven Pinker tweets.) Pinker inserted a link to a negative review of Nagel’s book, which he said “exposed the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” At the point where science, philosophy, and public discussion intersect—a dangerous intersection these days—it is simply taken for granted that by attacking naturalism Thomas Nagel has rendered himself an embarrassment to his colleagues and a traitor to his class.
The article goes on to detail the quick condemnation the book gathered, noting that The Guardian awarded it the prize for Most Despised Science Book of 2012.
“Thomas Nagel is of absolutely no importance on this subject,” wrote one [commenter on a negative review of Nagel’s book]. “He’s a self-contradictory idiot,” opined another. Some made simple appeals to authority and left it at that: “Haven’t these guys ever heard of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett?” The hearts of still others were broken at seeing a man of Nagel’s eminence sink so low. “It is sad that Nagel, whom my friends and I thought back in the 1960’s could leap over tall buildings with a single bound, has tripped over the Bible and fallen on his face. Very sad.”
Nagel doesn’t mention the Bible in his new book—or in any of his books, from what I can tell—but among materialists the mere association of a thinking person with the Bible is an insult meant to wound, as Bertie Wooster would say. Directed at Nagel, a self-declared atheist, it is more revealing of the accuser than the accused. The hysterical insults were accompanied by an insistence that the book was so bad it shouldn’t upset anyone.
Nagel’s main thrust in the book, and the reason for the ferocious anathema imposed upon him by other scientists and philosophers of science, is that materialism—the idea that everything can be explained (eventually) in terms of physics—actually fails to do just that.
Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them… It doesn’t explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from nonlife. Closer to home, it doesn’t plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren’t. These failures, Nagel says, aren’t just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. “There is little or no possibility,” he writes, “that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics.”
These things are known to be real by sheer common sense; the fact that materialism rejects them as the effects of solely physical processes seriously undercuts the ideology’s ability to make sense of the world.
Read all of Andrew Ferguson’s article at The Weekly Standard. At more than 6,500 words, it’s a longer read, but well worth it.
March 19th, 2013 | 2:16 pm
Edward Feser has also been helpfully discussing Nagel for a while on his blog, edwardfeser.com.
Nagel, like John Searle, has long been on my “Why isn’t he a believer, or at least a theist?” list.
March 19th, 2013 | 6:42 pm
I think that Thomas Nagel has displayed considerable courage in challanging the materialist dogma that saturates out intellectual world currently. Although a good case can be made that those predisposed toward liberal ideology tend to be more likely to accept, at least tacitly, a materialist metaphysical conception of reality, there are those who have been sympathetic toward Nagel’s latest book. See, for example:http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog/philosophy/thomas-nagel-mind-and-cosmos-review-leiter-nation/
Also, although Dr. Orr doesn’t agree with Professor Nagel’s thesis, he’s produced a respectful review of Nagel’s latest book: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/?pagination=false
I share Mr. Payne’s confusion as to why Nagel (and John Searle) are not Theists, I suspect that, at least with Professor Nagel, who I have a great amount of respect for, may be motivated, at least in part, by emotional factors. He, with great honesty, admitted in his 1997 book, defending reason as being the final judge in determining truth (THE LAST WORD, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS) that he “wants” atheism to be true. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Methodology/?view=usa&ci=9780195108347
See also Professor Plantinga’s excellent review of MIND AND COSMOS, for what may motivate atheists to not believe. Greatly insightful, I think. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/110189/why-darwinist-materialism-wrong#
March 19th, 2013 | 9:13 pm
@Craig’s question: basically, because they *can’t*. At some point Ferguson’s article quotes Nagel writing “If I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true, the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith.” Do you remember that old doctrine that faith is a gift, not an achievement? Or that passage from I Corinthians 1? There you have it.
March 20th, 2013 | 9:18 am
Apparently Mr. Nagle has been excommunicated as well as laicized.
March 20th, 2013 | 9:57 am
Leibniz’ asks that irreducibly question (at least to the scientific method) “why is there something rather than nothing?” It seems to me that Nagel has discovered it or something like it, in his own way, and resurrected it to the dismay of some of his peers. When confronted with this question these then attempt to answer “It just is”…which is no answer really, but merely an observation. Anathema to omniscient scientism is its inability to (potentially/eventually) answer any and every question humanity can express. Best bury Leibniz, and Nagel with him.
March 21st, 2013 | 2:17 am
I think that Prof. Pinker’s response to Nagel’s book is particularly amusing. As well as condescending: Nagel was once a “great thinker”, but darn it, not any more. As if Pinker is in a superior position to judge Nagel, and his work. I think that what we may be seeing here, is pure intellectual snobbery. Those who are religious and intellectual are not of our same elite class, and if we have anyone who we thought was in our elite class give a respectful hearing to those religious types, or, even worse, start to challenge us, our position, well, that’s just way beyond the pale.
March 21st, 2013 | 8:56 am
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion?
March 24th, 2013 | 5:12 pm
One of the linked articles asks ‘But what if science is fundamentally incapable of explaining our own existence as thinking things?’ Think about what science ‘explains’. It can only proceed in terms of objects and the forces and energy which affect them. So in order to ‘explain thinking things’, it needs to objectify them. But humans are subjects, not objects.
And that’s that.
March 28th, 2013 | 8:21 pm
What few seem to want to deeply consider is the flipside of Nagel’s challenges — what if there really isn’t anything more than raw energy, some of it condensed into matter? There are some brave, bold Rationalists/Atheists/(etc.) who will plainly state that their view means that there isn’t any meaning or purpose to life other than what we choose to give it, and our choosing is arbitrary, the result of electrochemical processes which produce the illusion that we are unified individuals. Fewer still will fully accept the logical consequences and act accordingly, which would entail holding lightly all views and opinions, caring little if at all about what other people believe or do. I seem to recall that Richard Dawkins himself has said that he hopes people don’t behave according to the logical deductions that can be made from knowing (believing) the evolutionary history of life.
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