[dirtboy]

Almost taunting the materialist left, which teaches skepticism but not self-skepticism

Classic.

[dirtboy]

The Heretic - Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?

[Lets Roll NOW]

The God haters are not very tolerant.

[Shadow44]

Modern philosophy is an intellectual desert. Postmodernism has been deconstructed to the point of empty parlor room word games.

I used to think that Postmodernism might be fading away, but what could come after such vapidness?

Maybe this is the start of a new beginning.

[Para-Ord.45]

bm

[Vaquero]

The clay became man at the moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought of “God”. The first Thou that—however stammeringly—was said by human lips to God marks the moment in which the spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was crossed. For it is not the use of weapons or fire, not new methods of cruelty or of useful activity, that constitute man, but rather his ability to be immediately in relation to God. This holds fast to the doctrine of the special creation of man ... herein ... lies the reason why the moment of anthropogenesis cannot possibly be determined by paleontology: anthropogenesis is the rise of the spirit, which cannot be excavated with a shovel. The theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it. But it does challenge the faith to understand itself more profoundly and thus to help man to understand himself and to become increasingly what he is: the being who is supposed to say Thou to God in eternity.

— Joseph Ratzinger

[HerrBlucher]

the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false

Absolutely! However, if the materialism is true there would be no way to know that it is true because Reason would then be invalid and merely the epiphenomenon of blind irrational forces i.e chemical reactions, eletromagnetic waves etc. Reason, in order to be valid, MUST be independent of nature. This was very clearly explained in C.S. Lewis's book "Miracles."

Clear thinking Atheists know this but just cannot give up on Atheism regardless of its glaring, in your face, falsity. So they throw tantrums instead.

[sphinx]

bttt

[trebb]

Almost taunting the materialist left, which teaches skepticism but not self-skepticism Classic.

Yep - just as "An unexamined life is not worth living" displays how worthless the Left is - they examine everyone but themselves.

[mjp]

A mob is indeed forming, a mob of materialists

To be a materialist, one has to believe that

1) omething came from nothing
2) natural law, symmetry, order, and beauty came from primordial disorder
3) organization came from utterly random primordial disorganization
4) consciousness,free will, and reason came from matter
5) life came from from non-life or inanimate chemicals
6) anthrropic coninidences came from chance
7) man, from pond scum
8) human knowledge and human values came from a universe without absolutes and without absolute truth

[Fightin Whitey]

bimp

[Shery]

it is always thrilling to watch the left become unhinged over something. there is so much to learn by watching them! any astute watcher would realize just how narrow-minded and close-minded they really are. they have memorized their talking points and beyond that, there is no reasoning to be done, so they mock, denigrate, profane, and retaliate against the supposed offender. we should encourage the ‘mocked’ to just step back and let the left carry on. what they accidentally do, is to cause some to wake up to reality.

[jocon307]

Thanks for posting this piece. I really like the author, I think we can call him a “liberal with sanity” like Ed Koch.

Today’s radical atheists are really quite a group. I don’t understand why they get themselves so worked up over stuff they don’t believe in.

But it’s only the God of the Christians and Jews that irritates them.

That world class moron Dawkins was actually asked about Allah the other day. He said he’d never thought much about him.

How mind bendingly S.T.U.P.I.D. is that?

To an atheist ALL Gods should be the same, some fake “god” that no sensible person could believe in. It makes sense for religious people to ponder the differences between religions, but not atheists.

He’s just a stinking, stupid coward. Yet he’s considered “an intellectual”.

The world is truly a pathetic place. I’m almost sure it wasn’t this pathetic years ago, but I could be wrong about that.

[sauropod]

read

[Huber]

Bump!

[betty boop]

But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.”

Jeepers, I wonder if Professor Pinker even read Nagel's deeply engaging and closely reasoned book. Had he done so, he probably would have noticed a couple of "interesting points" raised there to which he could have responded in rebuttal. Instead, he takes an ad hominum meat-ax to Professor Nagel.... (This tells me Pinker is not a serious thinker, whatever else he may be.)

Pinker is professor of language, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology at MIT. Nagel is professor of philosophy at NYU. Note: Neither is a biologist or any other kind of natural scientist. Yet the former is a disciple of Neo-darwinist orthodoxy. The latter, a self-described atheist, is not.

Neo-darwinist theory has been spectacularly successful at the level of microbiology. But Nagel raises the issue: To what extent do empirical findings of microbiology extrapolate to the system at large, such as to give a "complete" description of the system — in this case, the universe — in purely naturalistic, or materialist, or physicalist terms? He is "almost certain" that Neo-darwinist theory cannot do this.

The obvious problems that Neo-darwinism tries to obviate is the origin of life and the emergence/evolution of mind. [Folks like Dawkins, Pinker, Dennett, et al., evidently think it's perfectly acceptable to obviate what one cannot explain.] Thus a "bigger picture" than the one that sees only physico/chemical reactions according to physical laws as fully explaining the biological and psychological dimensions of the universe is critically needed.

Here we enter into the terrain of scientific cosmology. [The physicists and mathematicians are already there. So far the ones reluctant to join this party tend to be the evolutionary biologists.... To me, they are the "bitter clingers" of a decaying doctrine that would prefer to be sucked into a black hole than to live to see the coming paradigm shift in science.]

Nagel picks at a few good scabs, bound to upset the "bitter-clingers" who put all their hopes in Darwin, and none at all in human common sense and experience — not to mention Reason. (Darwin's theory is absolutely hapless to address where "reason" came from, or to explain what in Nature it can possibly refer to.)

Nagel first of all goes right after scientific reductionism:

Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.... But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense....

The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. But at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It seems inevitable that such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as a timeless one. The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. But more recently, with the acceptance of the big bang, cosmology has become a historical science. Mind, as a development of life, must be included as the most recent stage of this long cosmological history, and its appearance, I believe, casts its shadow back over the entire process and the constituents and principles on which the process depends....

...[T]he coming into existence of the genetic code — an arbitrary mapping of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms that can read the code and carry out its instructions — seems particularly resistant to being revealed as probable given physical laws alone. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 5 ff. [Italics added for emphasis.]

Nagel suspects that reductionist materialist approaches to the understanding of nature, and particularly of biological nature, do not, and cannot rise to the explanatory challenge. As Nagel puts it, "my guiding conviction is that mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature."

Plus then he adds insult to injury, by averring that teleology is implicit in biology. Teleology, that is Final Cause — a/k/a purposes or goals operative in natural processes and in Nature as a Whole — has been abolished by science since Francis Bacon. Yet, not only Nagel, but other noteworthy scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, think it's time to bring teleology back into scientific respectability.

Pretty good for an atheist, huh???

A little later (p. 16), Nagel adds

Science is driven by the assumption that the world is intelligible. That is, the world in which we find ourselves, and about which experience gives us some information, can not only be described but understood. That assumption is behind every pursuit of knowledge, including pursuits that end in illusion. In the natural sciences as they have developed since the seventeenth century, the assumption of intelligibility has led to extraordinary discoveries, confirmed by prediction and experiments, of a hidden natural order that cannot be observed by human perception alone. Without the assumption of an intelligible underlying order, which long antedates the scientific revolution [no kidding!!! Go back to first-millennium B.C. Greece for the fundaments of this understanding], those discoveries could not have been made. [Ibid., itals added for emphasis.]

Well, that's how Nagel basically gets the ball rolling in this fascinating book. Thus he tells us that Neo-darwinist theory is at least "incomplete." Also he will have no truck with devotees of Intelligent Design. (The idea of a "designer" seems to give him the willies. I gather if the "designer" were God, Nagel wouldn't trust him.) As for alternative cosmological theories that have the capacity of accounting for life and mind in Nature, he finds that monist, dualist, and emergent theories don't really cut it either.

He has his own modest proposal. But I won't tell you what it is. Rather, I urge you to read Nagel's book.

Whether or not you agree with his findings, you will learn a lot — from an honest thinker who is genuinely in pursuit of the Truth of the universe, while still having a very strong desire for its ultimate explanation to be capable of being cast in purely "naturalist" terms.

dirtboy, thank you so much for posting this fine essay. It only just came to my attention today. Really Good Stuff!!!