Quote Originally Posted by Applejack View Post
I will have to pick up this book, but from SU's review and the linked NYRoB review, this seems like a half-baked argument. It seems that Nagel is resting much of his argument on the fact that there are infinitesimal odds of a world with no life naturally progressing into the world in which we live. While it is true that the odds of creating the current set of lifeforms is virtually zero, that doesn't undermine evolution's explanatory power. The ex ante odds of any set of lifeforms being around after hundreds of millions of years of evolution is infinitesimal--evolution does not claim that our set of organisms is the best set.

Nagel is making a quasi-creationist move in claiming that if you created an organism out of whole cloth (as God or Darwin), you would be highly unlikely to have the modern world after setting evolution in motion. But as the NYRoBs points out (paraphrasing Dawkins) this is an argument based on personal incredulity. I have often wondered how life came from nothing, and science certainly has no authoritative narrative about how this occurred. But science is moving closer to answering this question. I find his argument with regards to science's ultimate biological explanatory power to be rather weak.

I won't comment on his cognition arguments as I am under-studied in that area.
I think everybody agrees that the cognition arguments are the best ones that raise the most profound questions. I've heard Dawkins claim he can't explain consciousness or cognition (though he's confident that science will one day be able to explain this).

Nagel does come very close to making a case for God. There's an interesting quote in Plantinga's review from the past where Nagel says essentially he's an atheist because he doesn't like religion, he finds it distasteful (not hard to empathize with him), and doesn't want to be associated with religious arguments. Still, intelligent desiagn purveyors and creationists are loving his book.