I thought about starting this in the astronomy sub-forum but decided here would be a stronger play for the CUF hardcore atheists.

So I’m reading this book, “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,” by Thomas Nagel (Oxford University Press). It has caused an enormous stir in the academic scientific community. Trust me that Nagel is no Hugh Nibley. He is a philosophy and law professor at NYU, and has a towering reputation as an innovative philosopher in secular academia. The “materialist neo-Darwinian conception” in the title refers to the Western scientific consensus that everything can or will ultimately be explained by science, and we humans are, through and through, material or physical, including, most notably, our minds.

The book is brief, 144 pages, and there is much philosophical mumbo jumbo (Nagel is a philosopher, not a scientist, and, by his own admission, the sole source of his scientific knowledge is books written for a popular audience such as Richard Dawkins’). But Nagel’s message may be summarized as follows: The materialist neo-Darwinian conception, says Nagel, cannot account for the appearance of life, the enormous, actually near infinite variety and complexity of life, consciousness, cognition, or the mind.

Nagel contends that even accepting evolution as the explanation for everything (and he concedes its widespread success in explaining a great dal), there simply was not enough time to generate the essentially infinite variety and complexity of life. More fundamentally, he identifies a void, a missing link between the big bang and advent of non-life matter, and the emergence of life, then consciousness, cognition, or the mind.

Specifically: What chemical or physical processes turned dead matter into life? What about evolution explains consciousness (perception of pain, cold, light)? Reasoning? Morality? What evolutionary imperatives produced Shakespeare and Mozart, indeed, the very drive for scientific inquiry? We don’t know. Specifically, nothing about the current materialist neo-Darwinian conception provides any explanation.

Nagel asserts there is such thing as objective morality, i.e., good and evil. Hitler was evil; Thomas Paine was good. (I too believe this.) Nagel expresses skepticism that a random, contingent, accidental process such as described by the neo-Darwinian conception -- i.e., random genetic mutations in combination with natural selection -- could have produced such natural laws.

I have linked two reviews of the book. They are yin and yang. One, by famous Notre Dame professor and philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in the New Republic, is (not surprisingly) quite positive. The other, by H. Allen Orr, a celebrated biologist and professor at the University of Rochester, and published in the New York Review of Books, is overall well balanced but negative (Orr is well known for constructively engaging theists; he has skewered Dawkins and Hitchins).

One indication of the strength of Mind and Cosmos’ reasoning is that Orr, though overall negatively reviewing the book, concedes: “Brains and neurons obviously have everything to do with consciousness but how such mere objects can give rise to the eerily different phenomenon of subjective experience seems utterly incomprehensible.” (Emphasis original.)

The book has been extensively reviewed in all of the toney periodicals, mostly negatively. Part of the fun is to read the book in parallel with the reviews. Indeed, I felt compelled to do this as a reality check. One thing Nagel does that raises eyebrows is contend that the “intelligent design” advocates have been unfairly maligned and vilified. Though Nagel does not share their religious convictions, and does not credit the answers they provide – he claims to be an atheist, almost a prerequisite if he is to retain any credibility in his field -- he claims they should be praised for asking the right questions of the materialist neo-Darwinian conception.

Being as I am intensely suspicious of orthodoxy, I have been perhaps most interested in his identification of an orthodoxy within the scientific community, the materialist neo-Darwinian conception. The strong negative reactions to Nagel’s book seem to look a lot like orthodoxy.

However, those prosletyzing the materialist neo-Darwinian conception make a convincing argument that our most reliable guide to truth has been empericism and the sciences including reasoning, or senses, and physical measurements, and (essentially as a matter of faith) it seems likely that science will one day provde truthful answers to the questions raised by Nagel.

What could be more interesting than this stuff?

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/b...erialism-wrong

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...gination=false