G-D WOULD COMPLICATE IT In that secularist redoubt the New Republic a bit of light shines through. In its pages Alvin Plantinga a renowned philosopher and religious Christian recently reviewed a slim new volume called Mind and Cosmos by another eminent philosopher NYU’s Thomas Nagel. Nagel argues that materialist naturalism — the belief that life on Earth arose purely through natural processes and human beings and all else in our world are purely material objects — is “antecedently unbelievable — a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense…. I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.”
Nagel has weathered the withering obloquy that inevitably follows the voicing of such heresy in the open-minded groves of academe. For endorsing of some of the conclusions of the Intelligent Design movement “Nagel paid the predictable price; he was said to be arrogant dangerous to children a disgrace hypocritical ignorant mind-polluting reprehensible stupid unscientific…. His new book will probably call forth similar denunciations.”
One of the intractable problems Nagel raises with materialist naturalism is that “[p]hysical science can explain the tides and why birds have hollow bones and why the sky is blue; but it cannot explain consciousness.” But Nagel “has even greater difficulty with cognition. He thinks it monumentally unlikely that unguided 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.’ He is thinking in particular of science itself.”
In other words even if one were to “concede for the moment that natural selection might perhaps be expected to produce creatures with cognitive faculties that are reliable when it comes to beliefs for example about the presence of predators or food or potential mates … what about beliefs that go far beyond anything with survival value … [like]physics … or evolutionary theory? What is the probability given materialist naturalism that our cognitive faculties should be reliable in such areas? It is very small indeed. It follows — in a wonderful irony — that a materialistic naturalist should be skeptical about science.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
