Mind and Cosmos

A short, deliberately provocative essay, subtitled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Nagel argues that the dominant scientific naturalism, which seeks to explain everything through physics and natural selection, cannot account for three features of the world: consciousness, cognition and value. Consciousness resists physical reduction, as he had argued in earlier work. Our capacity to reason and grasp truth cannot be explained merely as a trait selected for survival, since that would undermine our trust in reason itself. And if there are objective values, as he believes, it is hard to see why evolution would have equipped us to recognise them. Nagel rejects theism as an answer too, and instead explores the idea of natural teleology: laws of nature that make the emergence of life and mind likely, so that the universe in some sense comes to be aware of itself. The book drew sharp criticism from many philosophers and scientists, who argued that it underrated evolutionary explanation.

It is a sharp, compact challenge to the assumption that science as now conceived can explain everything, made by a major philosopher who is not a theist.