In the beginning was the Word

As I mentioned yesterday, in the final chapter of his book The Last Word, Thomas Nagel puzzles over the fact that if, as he has argued, reason enables us to understand the world, then what does it say about the nature of the universe that it has given rise to creatures capable of understanding? There seems to be an affinity between mind and the world at a deep, rather than a superficial, level. But doesn’t this imply that mind, or reason, or intelligibility, is a fundamental element of the order of things, rather than a latecomer?

It’s no coincidence that rationalists have always tended to be religious; the ability of mind to comprehend the universe of which it seems to be only a small and insignificant part has always been something of a mystery. Nagel admits “that this idea—that the capacity of the universe to generate organisms with minds capable of understanding the universe is itself somehow a fundamental feature of the universe—has a quasi-religious ‘ring’ to it, something vaguely Spinozistic” (p. 132).

The most common contemporary alternative account for the existence of mind is a Darwinian one, but Nagel finds this inadequate for several reasons. The idea that reason was selected for because of its survival value would seem to give us confidence in reason only with respect to its limited “coping” functions. What reason is there to think that it would be reliable in science and mathematics, for instance? Moreover, while an evolutionary story may give a causal account for the emergence of reason, it can’t offer rational grounds for trusting it. The evolutionary account itself depends for its validity on our ability to trust our reason in the higher spheres of science and mathematics, but seems to offer insufficient grounds for such confidence. “I have to be able to believe that the evolutionary explanation is consistent with the proposition that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct—not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so” (p. 136).

But if the evolutionary account of reason is inadequate, why not consider the “religious hypothesis”? Maybe we’re endowed with the capacity for understanding the universe because we mirror, in a small and imperfect way, the mind of our creator, who also is responsible for the existence and the order of the universe. Nagel frankly admits that part of his resistance to this is that he doesn’t want there to be a God. “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” (p. 130).

In fact, Nagel thinks, this widespread (at least among intellectuals) fear of religion partly drives the search for theories that reduce mind, consciousness, and life to the basic physical constituents of the cosmos. This is regrettable because, in his view, mind just is one of the basic constituents of the universe, and our theorizing ought to take account of that, rather than trying to explain it away.

Nevertheless, Nagel doesn’t think that the rationalist position he’s defended has to push him toward theism:

Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of nonteleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed. There might still be thought to be a religious threat in the existence of the laws of physics themselves, and indeed in the existence of anything at all—but it seems to be less alarming to most atheists.

This is a somewhat ridiculous situation. First of all, one should try to resist the intellectual effects of such a fear (if not the fear itself), for it is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist. But having said that, I would also like to offer somewhat inconsistently the reassurance that atheists have no more reason to be alarmed by fundamental and irreducible mind-world relations than by fundamental and irreducible laws of physics. It is possible to accept a world view that does not explain everything in terms of quantum field theory without believing in God. (p. 131)

But maybe atheists should be alarmed by fundamental and irreducible laws of physics. And, for that matter, the existence of anything at all. While it may be possible in principle to find some fundamental feature of the universe that satisfactorily explains the mind-world relation, both of these phenomena seem to stubbornly point beyond the physical universe. The fact that there is anything at all, and the fact that there is one particular set of fundamental laws of physics rather than some other possible set both seem to require something “external” to the universe for the explanation, if they are to be explained at all. Especially considering that those laws gave rise to life forms endowed with consciousness and reason, which Nagel has already conceded resists explanation in non-teleological terms.

In his book Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, Diogenes Allen discusses the theological issues that the existence and order of the universe raise. He argues that the questions “Why does the universe (or the collection of finite beings) exist at all?” and “Why does nature have this order rather than some other possible order?” are meaningful questions which point to the possibility of God, though they don’t admit of definitive answers. Whether we affirm the theistic answer or the atheistic answer, we are going beyond what is strictly required by science or philosophy (see pp. 64-84). Granting Allen’s point, we might still say that the existence of reason may well tilt things in the theistic direction, or, at the very least, we might say that a theist would be more at home in a universe that has an inherent affinity with reason.