On Heretics and “Heroic Feats of Cognitive Dissonance”

I’ve been spending some time in the first two chapters of Genesis over the last few weeks as we make our way into a summer worship series on creation. And one cannot read very far in the literature about the first two chapters of the bible without at some point encountering the predictable, tendentious battles between evolutionary naturalism and creation, science and religion, etc. It seems to me that those who get the most excited about these issues often quite badly misunderstand either the nature of science or the nature of religion. Or both. And this tends to lead to a considerable amount of heat and not a great deal of light being generated in public discourse on this issue. 

This is true in the church, certainly. But it is also true in the academy. One of the articles on these matters that I recently came across is “The Heretic” by Andrew Ferguson (from The Weekly Standard). It discusses the NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel’s recently published Mind and Cosmos and its reception by the wider philosophical/scientific community. When I was an undergraduate studying philosophy, Thomas Nagel was widely admired. We had to read his famous work on phenomenology and consciousness called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” His work also figured prominently in every class on Philosophy of Mind.  But Nagel has fallen from grace, it seems. Quite rapidly, in fact.

Why? Well, because Mind and Cosmos calls into question the dominant and widely accepted worldview (in the academy and beyond) of evolutionary naturalism (the subtitle of the book kind of gives it away: “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”). Nagel is still an atheist, of course (he’s not crazy!), but he is convinced that there is more going on in the story than most accepted accounts of the nature of our world will allow. He is prepared to consider that nature might be inherently teleological—that some kind of goal might be built into the structure and mechanisms of reality. And for this, he has been savagely pilloried by his fellow academics. It is a still, evidently, a dangerous thing to depart from the cherished orthodoxies of those in positions of power and influence.

I’ve not yet read Mind and Cosmos so I cannot comment on the book’s merits or lack thereof. But the reaction to its publication as described in Ferguson’s article is fascinating, even if entirely unsurprising. The passion and fervour with which Nagel is mocked and ridiculed by thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins for departing from the materialistic script is truly remarkable. One would think (or hope, at least) that intellectual discourse might be a bit more measured and restrained. One would think that the academy would be a safe place to broach a wide variety of ideas and possibilities. One would think that seriously considering the possibility of purpose in the cosmos would not lead to one being labelled “retrograde” or having one’s mental faculties called into question. One would, alas, be wrong.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that Nagel is at least asking important questions. For him, a worldview of evolutionary materialism is too threadbare. It doesn’t account for enough of our experience of the world. It tells part of the story, but not the entire story. It can’t do justice to how we think about and participate in some of the most important things in life—things like freedom, love, beauty, and wonder. In other words, Nagel seems to be wrestling with what most of us sense intuitively (imagine that—a philosopher with his feet in the general vicinity of the ground?!). Ferguson puts this very well in the article:

Ferguson goes on:

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is said to have remarked that scientists can tell us everything about human beings except “what it is to be born, to live, or to die.” I think this is as true today as it was in Kierkegaard’s nineteenth century. The difference, I think, is that today we are less capable of recognizing (or more unwilling to acknowledge) this “heroic feat of cognitive dissonance” that we are daily performing. We cheerfully live as if freedom were real, goodness and beauty were objective, and truth and morality were universal and binding, while rarely bothering to inquire as to whether or not our meta-assumptions about the nature of the world allow for the very elements of human life and experience that we most highly prize.

And Thomas Nagel’s sanity is questioned?