Thomas Nagel and why he matters

There's a new book out by Thomas Nagel who up until now has been considered the darling of atheists and secularists everywhere. But he has shaken up many and brought down upon himself a great deal of wrath with the publication of a new book. Let's explore the uproar in this blog and future ones.

First, a bit of background about Nagel. He's a philosopher who has written on ethics, politics, and the philosophy of the mind. People actually enjoy reading him because of his clarity and simplicity. Imagine that--a philosopher you can read and understand. He previously taught at Princeton, he writes well-received articles for snooty journals, and he's a confirmed atheist. 

 

But then he wrote and published Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Boy, did the excrement hit the fan. Nagel has become an embarrassment and traitor to many of those who reject the idea of a God. In fact, a British paper awarded the book its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012.

What did he say that disturbed so many? Here’s a quotation from the book that reveals his crime:

“For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe. It is 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. . . I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life.”  

Sorry, but I've got to leave you hanging at this point since life is happening to me, and a lot of things are calling for my attention. But I want to explore this important book further in a future blog.