nationalpost:
‘What has gotten into Thomas Nagel?’: Leading atheist branded a ‘heretic’ for daring to question Darwinism
The philosopher Thomas Nagel is not taking phone calls. His secretary at New York University says there have been hundreds, all wanting to reach the modern “heretic,” as a current magazine cover labels him, but he is not taking the bait.
All he did was argue in a new book the evolutionary view of nature is “false,” and now grand forces have descended upon him. He does not want to talk about it.
The vicious reception handed Mind & Cosmos, which urges deep skepticism about evolution’s explanatory power, illustrates the perils of raising arguments against intellectual orthodoxy.
One critique said if there were a philosophical Vatican, Prof. Nagel’s work should be on the index of banned books for the comfort it will give creationists. Another headline proclaimed Prof. Nagel is “not crazy.”
The book has won a British booby prize for “Most Despised Science Book” and prompted sneering remarks the author is centuries behind the times, and somehow missed the Enlightenment. (Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images; Illustration Andrew Barr/National Post)
If you can’t quiet define something, if you can’t completely control it or place it in a box, if you can’t fully know the other (such as the bat for those who’d like to do a little reading) then how can you say something is, completely and surely, as science seeks to do?
Nagel argues for knowing, for touching what Deleuze and Guattari term the “intense stream of life,” for the value and reality of Bergson’s “intuition” and Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world.” These are all forms of knowing radically different from those of science, empiricism, and reductionism but they don’t displace them, rather they compliment and balance them.
And this is the key, for if there were one “right” or “true” thing, a process such as evolution say, which once fully developed left no space for the unknown it too would cease to be and in fact never would have been—the manner of its death certain, life stripped of the element of choice and chance.
Nagel, rather than being behind the times or arguing against life is, I believe, pointing to something eternal and invigorating: the presence of a question—even the most certain of what we know carries a tinge of doubt, a space within that prompts wonder.
If I were to guess I’d say Nagel isn’t so concerned with evolution per se as with our tendency to believe we can know a thing with certainty, our tendency to lull ourselves into a kind of living that is a form of dying, a denial of life’s essential openness. I can understand how remaining open is difficult to many people—how, in the face of certain death, pain, and suffering, of broken heartedness, and all the hardship life places in our way we’re prone to hold fast to those few things that provide comfort. In the unsteady sea of life certainty is as illusory as it is powerful.
