Dualism and Teleology

At the heart of Scruton’s 
Soul of the World is a plea for a “cognitive dualism” that he sets in opposition to all “nothing but” reductionisms – music is nothing but sounds, painting nothing but pigments on canvas, the world nothing but matter in motion, humans thought nothing but neurons firing in the brain.

He argues that “consciousness could not be reduced to any physical process, and that the relation between the human brain and the human mind could not be deciphered or eliminated by any purely biological science. Almost consciousness would be ‘left over’ from any purely physical account of human thought and action, and its peculiar immediacy and transparency would be a kind of irreducible residue of neurological explanation” (40). He points to first-person phenomenology and intentionality as key reasons for affirming this dualism. There is an “inner character” to mental states that cannot be accounted for with physical theory, and there is a “directedness” or “aboutness” to mental states that cannot be reduced to relations between two things, the brain and the subject matter of thought (40).

Another key theme of his book is his shift from arguments about the existence of God to arguments about God’s
presence. This is rooted in cognitive dualism: We can examine the world for “natural kinds, causal connections, and universal covering laws” or we can approach the world in “the way of understanding,” in which we demand “reasons and meanings” (184). The way of explanation is a nothing-but approach, and in that mode we cannot uncover decisive evidence of purpose. But Scruton argues that it is “our nature” to seek meaning and pursue the way of understanding (185). 

God is the answer to our Why? to the world as a whole. “Teleological principles,” he admits “can  . . . can leave no discernible mark in the order of nature, as physics describes it. Nevertheless, it is as though we humans orientate ourselves by such principles rather as some animals might orientate themselves by the earth’s magnetic field. In the order of the covenant we are pointed in a certain direction, guided by reasons, whose authority is intrinsic to them” (187). 

This is, he argues, one of the great realities that cannot be accounted for in the way of explanation. Citing Thomas Nagel’s recent
Mind and Cosmos, Scruton argues that “it is an unlikely accident that we humans are guided by our reason toward the true and the good” (186).