Little Book, Big Waves Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Nine Years Later – Discovery Institute

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Philosopher and atheist Thomas Nagels little book,Mind and Cosmos, from 2012, continues to make big waves. He credited intelligent design proponents including Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe with helping to undermine (per the subtitle) the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature.Writing for the journalPublic Discourse,Matthew J. Franckcalls it a book that stuck for him, meaning one that sticks around in his thinking and writing in various ways, despite being outside Francks academic discipline:

My last recommendation is of a book that came to my attention in a more ordinary way accompanied by widespread attention, acclaim, and criticism. Philosopher Thomas NagelsMind and Cosmos(2012), coming in at only 126 pages plus notes, is a brisk but densely argued brief against the view, dominant among most contemporary scientists, that a reductionist materialism can explain, well, us creatures with consciousness and cognition who believe that our value judgments are rooted in reality. Nagels daring and iconoclasm are evident in his subtitle,Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. He was persuaded, he writes, by the intelligent design school of Darwin critics that the standard evolutionary account of the human mind comes up short. Nagel does not embrace the design thesis himself, but his thrusting it away rests on the rather feeble ground that he lack[s] thesensus divinitatisthat enables indeed compels so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose.

Franck, among other distinctions, is Associate Director of the James Madison Program and Lecturer in Politics at Princeton.

Nagel put a sell by date on the Darwinist idea of mind:

I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid. The human will to believe is inexhaustible.

As a colleague points out, Nagels departure from the right-thinking consensus is on a par with Yale computer scientistDavid Gelernters 2019 farewell to Darwinism: both are major thinkers who showed that rejecting that orthodoxy can be done. Their courage also persuades me itwillbe done, by others of equal stature, giving intellectual permission to others in turn, until the tipping point that Nagel forecasts comes to pass. Of course, his sober warning about the next consensus must also be heeded.

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Little Book, Big Waves Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, Nine Years Later - Discovery Institute