Nagel SPAT

N.SPAT

Thomas Nagel. Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008 (Oxford 2010).

Essay: Dawkins and atheism

23a. "The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics."

23b. The following relates to my basic theme:

"The entire dialectic leaves out another possibility, namely, that there are teleological principles in nature that are explained neither by intentional design nor by purposeless physical causation -- principles that therefore provide an independent endpoint of explanation for the existence and form of living things. That, more or less, is the Aristotelian view that was displaced by the scientific revolution."

Side note: Nietzsche's eternal return adopts this bit of Aristotelianism.

25c. "The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism."

26c. "If thinking, feeling and valuing aren't merely complicated physical states of the organism, what are they? What is their relation to the brain processes on which we depend? If evolution is a purely physical causal process, how can it have brought into existence conscious beings?

26d. "The religious world view is only one response to the conviction that the real?? description of the world is incomplete..."

"More reasonable, in my estimation, would be to admit that we do not have the understanding or knowledge on which to base a comprehensive theory of reality."