Nagel on Religion
25 October 2006 by Bob
A very interesting piece from Nagel on Dawkins. It’s a review of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Nagel is what we call a “mysterian” on the subject of consciousness, a position that also seems to infect his views on religion. Some highlights:
To be sure, the hypothesis of a divine creator is not yet a scientific theory with testable consequences independent of the observations on which it is based. And the purposes of such a creator remain obscure, given what we know about the world. But a defender of the argument from design could say that the evidence supports an intentional cause, and that it is hardly surprising that God, the bodiless designer, while to some extent describable theoretically and detectable by his effects, is resistant to full intuitive understanding. [...] The reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by considering both the watch and the eye is that these are complex physical structures that carry out a complex function, and we cannot see how they could have come into existence out of unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of physics. For the elements of which they are composed to have come together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of chance can be ruled out. But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them.
Then Nagel takes some time to explain the concept of non-reductionism in scientific explanation (a position with which I happen to agree). But it’s not clear, given these comments, what the reader is supposed to do with them. Is it: Dawkins is wrong about religion because he (say) is wrong about reductionism in science, and tries to apply this misdirected method to critiques of religion?
I must be missing something here.


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