Some
elite circles in the academic world are aflame with anger at the
apostasy of one of their former darlings, a man who may be the most
famous philosopher in America. Dr. Thomas Nagel has an endowed chair
at New York University as a University Professor and has been praised
for many years for his original scholarship. He is, naturally, a
committed atheist. And yet he has created shock waves in the academic
world with a book he published in 2012, a book that The
Guardian
recognized as the most despised book of the year.
As
a philosopher, Nagel tackles the ambitious task of challenging the
way science applies its tools and its paradigms to make sense of the
natural order. Of special interest is the way science explains a
universe that obviously enables the rise,
not just of life,
but of consciousness and the intangible values and systems that are
integral to human life. The rise of life in any form he finds a
difficult enough challenge for science to explain using the reigning
paradigm of materialism. But Nagel finds the gap between the claims
of science and common sense to be particularly severe when we then
seek to explain how the random rise of life would then lead to
conscious and reasoning creatures who can discuss and strive for
concepts such as truth and justice. The rise of life is improbable
enough, and Nagel finds it inherently unreasonable to rely on ever
dwindling improbabilities as the answer for a universe that seems to
be infused with purpose.
As
a confirmed atheist, Nagel feels that science must rise to the
challenge more effectively and offer new models that better explain
why the Cosmos that we experience appears to reverberate with this
primal command: “Let there be life.”
Then,
most majestically, one more decree: “Let there be
consciousness.”
The
existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one
of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the
natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can
aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science,
whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us
necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows it cannot
provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. (p. 51)
Nagel’s
apostasy lies in pointing out what that the reigning paradigm of
materialism fails the common sense test. It fails to account for who
we are and what we perceive. It fails to adequately address the
mind-body problem or the many wonders of the mind, the power of our
sense of right and wrong, and the ability we have to reason, ponder,
strive for truth, and even change our behavior on the basis of that
reasoned striving.
Nagel
is profoundly skeptical that “the process of natural selection
should have generated creatures with the capacity to discover by
reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the
initial appearances—as we take ourselves to have done and to
continue to do collectively in science, logic, and ethics. Is it
credible that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should
have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that
were unimaginable at the time?”
This
theme of Nagel’s has, of course, been treated by others from
scientific and philosophical perspectives. I first encountered this
problem in The
Runaway Brain.
No, I’m not talking about the
1995 film
about another serious but less common mind-body problem. Rather, I
refer to the 1993 book, The
Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness
by Christopher Wills, who offers the hypothesis that the influence of
human culture helped create a feedback loop that has amplified the
role of the brain and gradually led to our current thinking state
with nothing but Darwinian means. An interesting, speculative, and
unsatisfying read, though highly acclaimed, that I feel does not
adequately appreciate the difficulty of the mind-body problem.
Here
I must add my own skepticism. How can the pressures for survival that
may have allowed one clan of cave dwellers to better escape predators
than their neighbors—“ug, run!”—have resulted
in minds that could, for example, compose Tang dynasty poetry that is
then sung to delicate music and brushed with astonishing skill and
beauty onto silk? The edge given by random mutations in the
dog-eat-dog or tiger-eat-caveman world of natural selection leaves
little room for such advanced mental machinery that do not directly
relate to the task of not being eaten and passing on one’s
genes.
Scientists
claim that their theories are up to the task, but the explanation so
far is highly unsatisfactory. Can it do better? Can naturalistic
means be proposed to account for reason and consciousness? Nagel
believes it must be possible, and asks thinkers to recognize the
problem more fully in order to formulate an answer.
Nagel
wants—perhaps desperately wants—science to better account
for the “brute facts” of our existence, including the
“creation of life from dead matter or the birth of
consciousness, or reason” (p. 25).
Nagel
feels that the approach of materialism is not just incomplete,
awaiting further refinements of its tools and data sets, but is
inherently inadequate. It’s the wrong tool and is simply not up
to the task, for “there is little or no possibility” that
the brute facts of our existence “depend on nothing but the
laws of physics” (p. 25). He does not see God or theistic
Creation as a necessary answer, though admits that some of the
arguments raised by supporters of intelligent design deserve more
than just the scorn with which they are blindly dismissed.
Nagel
is a doubter who dares to challenge a ruling paradigm and the
Establishment of reductionism, in which all aspects of our existence
are reduced to nothing but the interactions of atoms and neurons
according to the laws of physics. In making this challenge, he knows
hostility will follow. “I realize such doubts will strike many
people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our
secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive
research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else
would not be science” (p. 7).
The
browbeating and the war on heretical views is not unique to
science in my view but includes many fields, but the alleged findings
of science are widely cited to give authority to the reigning
paradigm, often without really grasping what science really can and
cannot yet say. As for the hostility Nagel faces, it may be
widespread but I suspect Nagel is prepared and capable of dealing
with it. Fortunately, it's not as angry as if he had come out in
favor of traditional marriage as did another popular author, Orson
Scott Card, nor as surprising, intense, and well-deserved as the
reaction of Truman Capote's elite friends to his publication of
Answered
Prayers,
a vicious volume of gossip. Nagel's work of scholarship still is
daring and may cost him dearly over time, though I think the fires of
the current Inquisition will die down quickly and just leave him
lightly scorched.
Part
of the problem recognized by Nagel is that the materialistic,
neo-Darwinian attempt to explain our existence cannot account for the
natural conviction that there is such a thing as moral standards or
truth. The materialist approach “implies that we
shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the
scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself
depends” (p. 27).
There
are other issues, such as the vast improbabilities for the rise of
DNA. The authority of science is not enough, in his view, to force us
to suspend our common sense about the majesty and wonder of life and
consciousness. But he is not thumping a Bible or calling upon God as
an explanation for anything. Nagel explains that, “My
skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a belief in
any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available
scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion,
does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the
incredulity of common sense. That is especially true with regard to
the origin of life” (p. 6).
The
origin of life lacks the benefit of natural selection as a mechanism
for evolutionary advance, so how can the majestic rise of the
remarkable genetic mechanisms behind natural selection be accounted
for without relying on wondrously minute probabilities guiding the
steps toward life? Nagel is asking fair and, for many, rather
irritating questions.
And
to complete the link with physics, the explanation has to suppose
that there is a nonnegligible probability that some sequence of
steps, starting from nonliving matter and depending on purely
physical mechanisms, could eventually have resulted in a replicating
molecule capable of all this, embodying a precise code billions of
characters long, together with the ribosomes that translate that code
into proteins. It is not enough to say, “Something had to
happen, so why not this?” I find the confidence among the
scientific establishment that the whole scenario will yield to a
purely chemical explanation hard to understand, except as a
manifestation of an axiomatic commitment to reductive materialism.
(p. 46)
And
again, explaining consciousness adds an entirely new dimension of
difficulty to the problem.
Nagel
hopes that some purpose-based explanation may be found and calls upon
the academic community to recognize the limitations of the tools
previously applied, to be more humble in confronting the unsolved
mysteries of life and consciousness, and to take on the real
challenges before them. I hope his message will be considered and not
merely dismissed and scorned, but prospects for that may be low right
now. I suppose further scientific revelations about the majesty and
improbability of life may be needed to bring about the hoped-for
revolution in science.
Meanwhile,
as a Latter-day Saint, I also look forward to further insights from
any source on the miraculous life we experience and the marvels of
existence and consciousness. From the perspective of a lowly
engineer, when I contemplate the grandeur in the design of the
cosmos, of stars, of this planet and its life forms, and of the human
mind, that it was even possible to find solutions to all the problems
and conflicting constraints, that it was even possible to tailor the
material properties of matter to make all this possible, still simply
floors me.
Jeff Lindsay has been defending the Church on the Internet since 1994, when he launched his
LDSFAQ website under JeffLindsay.com. He has also long been blogging about LDS matters on
the blog Mormanity (mormanity.blogspot.com). Jeff is a longtime resident of Appleton,
Wisconsin, who recently moved to Shanghai, China, with his wife, Kendra.
He works for an Asian corporation as head of intellectual property. Jeff and Kendra are the parents of 4 boys, 3 married and the the youngest on a mission.
He is a former innovation and IP consultant, a former professor, and former Corporate Patent
Strategist and Senior Research Fellow for a multinational corporation.
Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins and Mukund Karanjikar are authors of the book Conquering
Innovation Fatigue (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University and is a registered US
patent agent. He has more than 100 granted US patents and is author of numerous publications.
Jeff's hobbies include photography, amateur magic, writing, and Mandarin Chinese.