The core thesis of Mind and Cosmos can be simply stated. Darwinian materialism has failed to account for several undeniable features of human existence: consciousness, reason, meaning, and moral values. The problem is not that the answers haven’t yet been found, but rather that the paradigm itself precludes any satisfactory answers. All attempts to explain the mental and the moral in terms of the physical have been unsuccessful, and will continue to be. What is needed is not a novel Darwinian materialist solution, but rather a wholesale rejection of that paradigm in favor of a non-materialist (but non-supernaturalist) paradigm.

Thomas Nagel. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 130 pp.  Hardcover: $24.95.

There are basically three types of modern atheists: soft atheists, hard atheists, and conflicted atheists. Soft atheists deny God but still want to hold onto relatively traditional views of morality, rationality, and truth. New Atheists such as Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, with their sermonizing about the moral and intellectual failings of religion, fall into this category. They typically hold to a materialistic worldview, according to which everything ultimately reduces to physics and chemistry, but they haven’t come to terms with all the implications of that worldview.

Hard atheists, following the lead of Friedrich Nietzsche, realize that once you deny God and embrace a materialistic evolutionary account of human origins, you must abandon or radically revise your commonsense views of morality and rationality. Alex Rosenberg and the late Richard Rorty, though very different philosophers in many respects, both represent this more self-aware form of modern atheism.

Conflicted atheists–the label is mine–are a small but significant group. Such thinkers see clearly the intellectual superficiality of soft atheism, which fails to grapple seriously with the implications of the “death of God.” Yet they resist biting the bullet and embracing hard atheism because they aren’t prepared to abandon what they take to be commonsense beliefs about reason, meaning, and value. In their estimation, that would amount to intellectual suicide. Concerned to avoid both superficiality and self-defeat, their only way forward is to challenge the reigning atheistic worldview of Darwinian materialism and find some alternative worldview that will allow them to avoid falling into the clutches of theism. Whatever this alternative may be, it must be conceived as naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, for as biologist Richard Lewontin notoriously remarked, “We cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.”(1)

Thomas Nagel, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is perhaps the most prominent and penetrating representative of this third type of atheism. His recent book is a striking and significant blow against Darwinian orthodoxy, but it hasn’t come out of the blue. One of Nagel’s longstanding philosophical concerns has been to affirm the reality of the subjective (i.e., mind and consciousness) and to reconcile the subjective realm with the objective realm of empirical science. Nagel is a staunch realist about mind and moral values, and has argued forcefully against the materialistic reductionism that tries to explain mind in terms of matter alone. He has also shown sympathy in the past for teleology in nature and for the scientific arguments offered by those in the Intelligent Design movement.(2) It was only a matter of time before Nagel wrote this book.

The core thesis of Mind and Cosmos can be simply stated. Darwinian materialism has failed to account for several undeniable features of human existence: consciousness, reason, meaning, and moral values. The problem is not that the answers haven’t yet been found, but rather that the paradigm itself precludes any satisfactory answers. All attempts to explain the mental and the moral in terms of the physical have been unsuccessful, and will continue to be. What is needed is not a novel Darwinian materialist solution, but rather a wholesale rejection of that paradigm in favor of a non-materialist (but non-supernaturalist) paradigm.

Mind and Cosmos is not a long book (128 pages) and by the author’s design it is reasonably accessible to non-philosophers. The introductory chapter sets up the central problem to be discussed. “The world is an astonishing place,” and the fact that it has produced human beings is “the most astonishing thing about it” (p. 7). The reigning worldview in scientific circles today is reductive materialism–put crudely, the idea that the universe is ultimately nothing more than matter in motion. But Nagel considers it “prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection” (p. 6). The more work is done in trying to defend this account, the more sterile it appears.

Remarkably for an atheist, Nagel gives credit to Intelligent Design advocates such as Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer for their critiques of Darwinism. “They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair” (p. 10). Nevertheless, Nagel is far from ready to jump the atheist ship. He confesses that he lacks the sensus divinitatis that allows others to view the world as a divine creation; indeed, he is constitutionally opposed to the idea (p. 12). His preference is to explore the theoretical region between materialism and theism.

The main chapters of the book explain in more detail why Nagel thinks that reductive materialism is explanatorily inadequate and ultimately self-defeating. Chapter 2 defends an antireductionist view of the mental. Mind is “not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature” (p. 16). The notion that our rational conscious minds are the product of blind, undirected material processes is not only implausible but flies in the face of commonsense. Historically speaking, the major alternative to materialism is theism, which, as Nagel characterizes it, takes the polar opposite view: the material order is actually the product of mind (specifically, the divine mind). Nagel finds the theistic option to be equally unsatisfactory, however, because it locates ultimate explanations beyond the natural universe (and thus, Nagel mistakenly suggests, beyond our understanding). The “God of the gaps” bogeyman looms large in Nagel’s mind, and so his goal is to explore the territory between these two competing worldviews. In short, Nagel favors a worldview in which (i) both the physical and the psychical are equally ultimate aspects of the natural order, and (ii) there is nothing beyond the natural order. All final explanations must be natural explanations, but ‘natural’ includes both the material and the (irreducibly) mental.

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