By Alvin Plantinga
New Republic
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/110189/why-darwinist-materialism-wrong#
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
By Thomas Nagel
(Oxford University Press, 144 pp., $24.95)
I.
ACCORDING TO a semi-established consensus among the intellectual
elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other
supernatural being. Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood
but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of
natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced
all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings,
like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through;
they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what
there is in our world are the elementary particles described in
physics, together with things composed of these particles.
I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there
are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also
agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of
the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and
also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those
are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now. Call this
constellation of views scientific naturalism—or don’t call it that,
since there is nothing particularly scientific about it, except that
those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a
politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the
orthodoxy of the academy—or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority
opinion.
The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel would call it something else: an
idol of the academic tribe, perhaps, or a sacred cow: “I find this view
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 is an atheist; even so, however, he does not accept the
above consensus, which he calls materialist naturalism; far from it. His
important new book is a brief but powerful assault on materialist
naturalism.
NAGEL IS NOT AFRAID to take unpopular positions, and he does not seem
to mind the obloquy that goes with that territory. “In the present
climate of a dominant scientific naturalism,” he writes, “heavily
dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically
everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion, I have
thought it useful to speculate about possible alternatives. Above all, I
would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as
unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the
world.” Nagel has endorsed the negative conclusions of the much-maligned
Intelligent Design movement, and he has defended it from the charge
that it is inherently unscientific. In 2009 he even went so far as to
recommend Stephen Meyer’s book
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design,
a flagship declaration of Intelligent Design, as a book of the year.
For that piece of blasphemy Nagel paid the predictable price; he was
said to be arrogant, dangerous to children, a disgrace, hypocritical,
ignorant, mind-polluting, reprehensible, stupid, unscientific, and in
general a less than wholly upstanding citizen of the republic of
letters.
His new book will probably call forth similar denunciations: except
for atheism, Nagel rejects nearly every contention of materialist
naturalism. Mind and Cosmos rejects, first, the claim that life has come
to be just by the workings of the laws of physics and chemistry. As
Nagel points out, this is extremely improbable, at least given current
evidence: no one has suggested any reasonably plausible process whereby
this could have happened. As Nagel remarks, “It is an assumption
governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific
hypothesis.”
The second plank of materialist naturalism that Nagel rejects is the
idea that, once life was established on our planet, all the enormous
variety of contemporary life came to be by way of the processes
evolutionary science tells us about: natural selection operating on
genetic mutation, but also genetic drift, and perhaps other processes as
well. These processes, moreover, are unguided: neither God nor any
other being has directed or orchestrated them. Nagel seems a bit less
doubtful of this plank than of the first; but still he thinks it
incredible that the fantastic diversity of life, including we human
beings, should have come to be in this way: “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.” Nagel
supports the commonsense view that the probability of this happening in
the time available is extremely low, and he believes that nothing like
sufficient evidence to overturn this verdict has been produced.
So far Nagel seems to me to be right on target. The probability, with
respect to our current evidence, that life has somehow come to be from
non-life just by the working of the laws of physics and chemistry is
vanishingly small. And given the existence of a primitive life form, the
probability that all the current variety of life should have come to be
by unguided evolution, while perhaps not quite as small, is
nevertheless minuscule. These two conceptions of materialist naturalism
are very likely false.
But, someone will say, the improbable happens all the time. It is not
at all improbable that something improbable should happen. Consider an
example. You play a rubber of bridge involving, say, five deals. The
probability that the cards should fall just as they do for those five
deals is tiny—something like one out of ten to the 140th power. Still,
they did. Right. It happened. The improbable does indeed happen. In any
fair lottery, each ticket is unlikely to win; but it is certain that one
of them will win, and so it is certain that something improbable will
happen. But how is this relevant in the present context? In a fit of
unbridled optimism, I claim that I will win the Nobel Prize in
chemistry. You quite sensibly point out that this is extremely unlikely,
given that I have never studied chemistry and know nothing about the
subject. Could I defend my belief by pointing out that the improbable
regularly happens? Of course not: you cannot sensibly hold a belief that
is improbable with respect to all of your evidence.
NAGEL GOES ON: he thinks it is especially improbable that
consciousness and reason should come to be if materialist naturalism is
true. “Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive
naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.” Why
so? Nagel’s point seems to be that the physical sciences—physics,
chemistry, biology, neurology—cannot explain or account for the fact
that we human beings and presumably some other animals are conscious.
Physical science can explain the tides, and why birds have hollow bones,
and why the sky is blue; but it cannot explain consciousness. Physical
science can perhaps demonstrate correlations between physical conditions
of one sort or another and conscious states of one sort or another; but
of course this is not to explain consciousness. Correlation is not
explanation. As Nagel puts it, “The appearance of animal consciousness
is evidently the result of biological evolution, but this well-supported
empirical fact is not yet an explanation—it does not provide
understanding, or enable us to see why the result was to be expected or
how it came about.”
Nagel next turns his attention to belief and cognition: “the problem
that I want to take up now concerns mental functions such as thought,
reasoning, and evaluation that are limited to humans, though their
beginnings may be found in a few other species.” We human beings and
perhaps some other animals are not merely conscious, we also hold
beliefs, many of which are in fact true. It is one thing to feel pain;
it is quite another to believe, say, that pain can be a useful signal of
dysfunction. According to Nagel, materialist naturalism has great
difficulty with consciousness, but it 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.
Natural selection is interested in behavior, not in the truth of
belief, except as that latter is related to behavior. So 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 about the physical environment: beliefs, for example, about the
presence of predators, or food, or potential mates. But what about
beliefs that go far beyond anything with survival value? What about
physics, or neurology, or molecular biology, 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, or at any rate about those parts of
it far removed from everyday life.
This certainly seems right, and perhaps we can go even further.
Perhaps it is not initially implausible to think that unguided natural
selection could have produced creatures with cognitive faculties who are
reliable about matters relevant to survival and reproduction. But what
about metaphysical beliefs, such as theism, or determinism, or
materialism, or atheism? Such beliefs have little bearing on behavior
related to survival and reproduction, and unguided natural selection
couldn’t care less about them or their truth-value. After all, it is
only the occasional member of the Young Humanist Society whose
reproductive prospects are enhanced by accepting atheism. Given
materialist naturalism, the probability that my cognitive faculties are
reliable with respect to metaphysical beliefs would be low. So take any
metaphysical belief I have: the probability that it is true, given
materialist naturalism, cannot be much above .5. But of course
materialist naturalism is itself a metaphysical belief. So the
materialistic naturalist should think the probability of materialist
naturalism is about .5. But that means that she cannot sensibly believe
her own doctrine. If she believes it, she shouldn’t believe it. In this
way materialist naturalism is self-defeating.
II.
THE NEGATIVE CASE that Nagel makes against materialist naturalism
seems to me to be strong and persuasive. I do have the occasional
reservation. Most materialists apparently believe that mental states are
caused by physical states. According to Nagel, however, the
materialistic naturalist cannot stop there. Why not? Because the idea
that there is such a causal connection between the physical and the
mental doesn’t really explain the occurrence of the mental in a physical
world. It doesn’t make the mental intelligible. It doesn’t show that
the existence of the mental is probable, given our physical world.
Some materialists, however, seek to evade this difficulty by
suggesting that there is some sort of logical connection between
physical states and mental states. It is a logically necessary truth,
they say, that when a given physical state occurs, a certain mental
state also occurs. If this is true, then the existence of the mental is
certainly probable, given our physical world; indeed, its existence is
necessary. Nagel himself suggests that there are such necessary
connections. So wouldn’t that be enough to make intelligible the
occurrence of the mental in our physical world?
I suspect that his answer would be no. Perhaps the reason would be
that we cannot just see these alleged necessities, in the way we can
just see that 2+1=3. These postulated necessary connections are not
self-evident to us. And the existence of the mental would be
intelligible only if those connections were self-evident. But isn’t this
a bit too strong? Why think that the mental is intelligible,
understandable, only if there are self-evident necessary connections
between the physical and the mental? Doesn’t that require too much? And
if intelligibility does require that sort of connection between the
physical and the mental, why think the world is intelligible in that
extremely strong sense?
Now you might think someone with Nagel’s views would be sympathetic
to theism, the belief that there is such a person as the God of the
Abrahamic religions. Materialist naturalism, says Nagel, cannot account
for the appearance of life, or the variety we find in the living world,
or consciousness, or cognition, or mind—but theism has no problem
accounting for any of these. As for life, God himself is living, and in
one way or another has created the biological life to be found on Earth
(and perhaps elsewhere as well). As for the diversity of life: God has
brought that about, whether through a guided process of evolution or in
some other way. As for consciousness, again theism has no problem:
according to theism the fundamental and basic reality is God, who is
conscious. And what about the existence of creatures with cognition and
reason, creatures who, like us, are capable of scientific investigation
of our world? Well, according to theism, God has created us human beings
in his image; part of being in the image of God (Aquinas thought it the
most important part) is being able to know something about ourselves
and our world and God himself, just as God does. Hence theism implies
that the world is indeed intelligible to us, even if not quite
intelligible in Nagel’s glorified sense. Indeed, modern empirical
science was nurtured in the womb of Christian theism, which implies that
there is a certain match or fit between the world and our cognitive
faculties.
Given theism, there is no surprise at all that there should be
creatures like us who are capable of atomic physics, relativity theory,
quantum mechanics, and the like. Materialist naturalism, on the other
hand, as Nagel points out, has great difficulty accounting for the
existence of such creatures. For this and other reasons, theism is
vastly more welcoming to science than materialist naturalism. So theism
would seem to be a natural alternative to the materialist naturalism
Nagel rejects: it has virtues where the latter has vices, and we might
therefore expect Nagel, at least on these grounds, to be sympathetic to
theism.
SADLY ENOUGH (at least for me), Nagel rejects theism. “I confess to
an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard
the design alternative [i.e., theism] as a real option. I lack the
sensus divinitatis that enables—indeed, compels so many people to see in
the world the expression of divine purpose.” But it isn’t just that
Nagel is more or less neutral about theism but lacks that sensus
divinitatis. In The Last Word, which appeared in 1997, he offered a
candid account of his philosophical inclinations:
I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear
of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to
this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the
fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know
are religious believers.... It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God
and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there
is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to
be like that.
Here we have discomfort and distress at the thought that there might
be such a being as God; but this discomfort seems more emotional than
philosophical or rational.
So is there a strictly philosophical problem with theism, according
to Nagel? As far as I can see, the main substantive objection that he
offers is an appeal to that notion of unity. A successful worldview will
see the world as intelligible; and intelligibility, as Nagel conceives
it, involves a high degree of unity. The world is intelligible only if
there are no fundamental breaks in it, only if it contains no
fundamentally different kinds of things. Descartes, that great dualist,
thought that the world displays two quite different sorts of things:
matter and mind, neither reducible to the other. Nagel rejects this
dualism: his reason is just that such dualism fails to secure the unity
necessary for the world’s being intelligible.
Yet is there any reason to think that the world really is
intelligible in this very strong sense—any good reason to think that
there is fundamentally just one kind of thing, with everything being an
example of that kind, or reducible to things that are? Here three
considerations seem to be necessary. First, we need to know more about
this requirement: what is it to say that fundamentally there is just one
kind of thing? It is not obvious how this is to be understood. Aren’t
there many different sorts of things: houses, horses, hawks, and
handsaws? Well, perhaps they are not fundamentally different. But what
does “fundamentally” mean here? Is the idea that the world is
intelligible only if there is some important property that houses,
horses, hawks, and handsaws all share? What kind of property?
Second, how much plausibility is there to the claim that this sort of
unity really is required for intelligibility? Clearly we cannot claim
that Descartes’s dualism is literally unintelligible—after all, even if
you reject it, you can understand it. (How else could you reject it?) Is
it really true that the world is more intelligible, in some important
sense of “intelligible,” if it does not contain two or more
fundamentally different kinds of things? I see little reason to think
so.
And third, suppose we concede that the world is genuinely
intelligible only if it displays this sort of monistic unity: why should
we think that the world really does display such a unity? We might hope
that the world would display such unity, but is there any reason to
think the world will cooperate? Suppose intelligibility requires that
kind of unity: why should we think our world is intelligible in that
sense? Is it reasonable to say to a theist, “Well, if theism were true,
there would be two quite different sorts of things: God on the one hand,
and the creatures he has created on the other. But that cannot really
be true: for if it were, the world would not display the sort of unity
required for intelligibility”? Won’t the theist be quite properly
content to forgo that sort of intelligibility?
III.
I COME FINALLY to Nagel’s positive thesis. Materialist naturalism, he
shows, is false, but what does he propose to put in its place? Here he
is a little diffident. He thinks that it may take centuries to work out a
satisfactory alternative to materialist naturalism (given that theism
is not acceptable); he is content to propose a suggestive sketch. He
does so in a spirit of modesty: “I am certain that my own attempt to
explore alternatives is far too unimaginative. An understanding of the
universe as basically prone to generate life and mind will probably
require a much more radical departure from the familiar forms of
naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to conceive.”
There are two main elements to Nagel’s sketch. There is panpsychism,
or the idea that there is mind, or proto-mind, or something like mind,
all the way down. In this view, mind never emerges in the universe: it
is present from the start, in that even the most elementary particles
display some kind of mindedness. The thought is not, of course, that
elementary particles are able to do mathematical calculations, or that
they are self-conscious; but they do enjoy some kind of mentality. In
this way Nagel proposes to avoid the lack of intelligibility he finds in
dualism.
Of course someone might wonder how much of a gain there is, from the
point of view of unity, in rejecting two fundamentally different kinds
of objects in favor of two fundamentally different kinds of properties.
And as Nagel recognizes, there is still a problem for him about the
existence of minds like ours, minds capable of understanding a fair
amount about the universe. We can see (to some degree, anyway) how more
complex material objects can be built out of simpler ones: ordinary
physical objects are composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms,
which are composed of electrons and quarks (at this point things get
less than totally clear). But we haven’t the faintest idea how a being
with a mind like ours can be composed of or constructed out of smaller
entities that have some kind of mindedness. How do those elementary
minds get combined into a less than elementary mind?
The second element of Nagel’s sketch is what we can call natural
teleology.His idea seems to be something like this. At each stage in the
development of our universe (perhaps we can think of that development
as starting with the big bang), there are several different
possibilities as to what will happen next. Some of these possibilities
are steps on the way toward the existence of creatures with minds like
ours; others are not. According to Nagel’s natural teleology, there is a
sort of intrinsic bias in the universe toward those possibilities that
lead to minds. Or perhaps there was an intrinsic bias in the universe
toward the sorts of initial conditions that would lead to the existence
of minds like ours. Nagel does not elaborate or develop these
suggestions. Still, he is not to be criticized for this: he is probably
right in believing that it will take a lot of thought and a long time to
develop these suggestions into a truly viable alternative to both
materialist naturalism and theism.
I SAID ABOVE THAT Nagel applauds the negative side of Intelligent
Design but is doubtful about the positive part; and I find myself in
much the same position with respect to Mind and Cosmos. I applaud his
formidable attack on materialist naturalism; I am dubious about
panpsychism and natural teleology. As Nagel sees, mind could not arise
in our world if materialist naturalism were true—but how does it help to
suppose that elementary particles in some sense have minds? How does
that make it intelligible that there should be creatures capable of
physics and philosophy? And of poetry, art, and music?
As for natural teleology: does it really make sense to suppose that
the world in itself, without the presence of God, should be doing
something we could sensibly call “aiming at” some states of affairs
rather than others—that it has as a goal the actuality of some states of
affairs as opposed to others? Here the problem isn’t just that this
seems fantastic; it does not even make clear sense. A teleological
explanation of a state of affairs will refer to some being that aims at
this state of affairs and acts in such a way as to bring it about. But a
world without God does not aim at states of affairs or anything else.
How, then, can we think of this alleged natural teleology?
When it comes to accommodating life and mind, theism seems to do
better. According to theism, mind is fundamental in the universe: God
himself is the premier person and the premier mind; and he has always
existed, and indeed exists necessarily. God could have desired that
there be creatures with whom he could be in fellowship. Hence he could
have created finite persons in his own image: creatures capable of love,
of knowing something about themselves and their world, of science,
literature, poetry, music, art, and all the rest. Given theism, this
makes eminently good sense. As Nagel points out, the same cannot be said
about materialist naturalism. But do panpsychism and natural teleology
do much better?
Nagel’s rejection of theism does not seem to be fundamentally
philosophical. My guess is this antipathy to theism is rather widely
shared. Theism severely limits human autonomy. According to theism, we
human beings are also at best very junior partners in the world of mind.
We are not autonomous, not a law unto ourselves; we are completely
dependent upon God for our being and even for our next breath. Still
further, some will find in theism a sort of intolerable invasion of
privacy: God knows my every thought, and indeed knows what I will think
before I think it. Perhaps hints of this discomfort may be found even
in the Bible itself:
Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely, oh Lord....
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
This discomfort with theism is to some extent understandable, even to
a theist. Still, if Nagel followed his own methodological prescriptions
and requirements for sound philosophy, if he followed his own arguments
wherever they lead, if he ignored his emotional antipathy to belief in
God, then (or so I think) he would wind up a theist. But wherever he
winds up, he has already performed an important service with his
withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive
dogmas of our age.
Alvin Plantinga is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University
of Notre Dame and is the author, most recently, of Where the Conflict
Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University
Press). This article appeared in the December 6, 2012 issue of the
magazine under the headline “A Secular Heresy.”
