The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (67 page)

In particular, he does not think that the three aspects of mind—consciousness, reason and value—could result from natural selection because they do not obviously confer selective advantage. Evolutionary naturalism, for instance, is indifferent to morality (value), as is higher mathematics (reason, logic). Why should evolution prefer the perception of moral truth to whatever happens to be immediately advantageous for reproduc
tion? For that matter, what is evolutionarily advantageous about knowing the theory of evolution? For Nagel this is no more than commonsensical, but it is these matters, he says, that we have been browbeaten over.

It is also obvious to him that we find it impossible to abandon the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe. Although he continues to reject any notion of a transcendent being, he sees this as further underlining the fact that any explanation of the universe as just “a physical process” cannot be justified: it has to include teleological elements.
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Teleology is the nub of the argument in
Mind and Cosmos.

This vacancy in our understanding, as he puts it—that physics and evolution are inadequate—he addresses by speculating about the “possibility of a principle of change over time tending toward certain types of outcome.” This is a coherent view, he maintains, which implies that the physical laws we are familiar with are not fully deterministic. Moreover, consciousness is permeated with intentionality, intentions based on capacities that were unimaginable in the remote past. And he repeats: there is no adaptive need for many mental capacities, and it is not easy to see how they have survival value.

But, he goes on, if we believe in a natural order (an order we recognize), “then something about the world that eventually gave rise to rational beings must explain this possibility.” Natural teleology is the answer, he says, and is distinct from the other alternatives—chance, creationism and disinterested physical law. Seeing the world in teleological terms means that in addition to physical laws of the familiar kind we have to accommodate other laws of nature that are “biased toward the marvelous.” There is, in other words, “a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness and the value that is inseparable from them.” “The process seems to be one of the Universe gradually waking up.” He found all this entirely congruent with his atheism, but “I conclude that something is missing from Darwinism.”
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Nagel offers the view that there is a “cosmic predisposition” over and above the laws of physics, “without positive conviction.” He is simply trying to extend the boundaries of “what is not regarded as thinkable,” but adds that he is willing to bet “that the present and right-thinking consensus will come to be seen as laughable in a generation or two.”

Mind and Cosmos
is a short but breathtakingly ambitious work. Despite Nagel’s avowed atheism, his book received a warm reception from creationists and believers in the concept of intelligent design; the Discovery Institute, advocates of intelligent design, have approved his supposed “deconversion from Darwinism.” Orthodox scientists have been less appreciative, arguing that he has confused the fact that evolutionary theory is incomplete with the idea that it is false. Others point out that “epistemic humility”—the recognition that one could be wrong—is a hallmark of science; no one has been “browbeaten” into any sacrosanct view—it is simply that, so far, Darwinism has had the better of the argument.

Yet others have confessed to being confused by Nagel’s notion of natural teleology in view of the fact, for example, that there are so many different forms of life on earth, and so many instances of extinction. Also, mindless creatures far outnumber sentient ones. Several evolved eyes and then lost them as they adapted to dark environments; several parasites, having begun their evolutionary careers as complex organisms, became simpler after taking up their parasitic lifestyles. How, these scientists have asked, can teleology account for any of this?

Steven Pinker, the Harvard experimental psychologist and author of
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
, has described Nagel’s book as a piece of “shoddy reasoning by a once-great thinker.” Others have argued that Nagel makes no attempt to back up empirically what is in effect an intuitive argument, and in that sense has contravened simple scientific (not to mention commonsensical) principles. They say that recent research, with which Nagel appears unfamiliar, points toward an “RNA world,” of a simple ribonucleic acid, where self-replicating molecules may have emerged—still accidentally, but much less accidentally than previously thought. And philosophers point out that values—ethics and morals, for example—are
guides
to behavior, not explanations for it. We should give up the idea (as other philosophers have done) that there are objective moral truths, applicable everywhere and in all circumstances.

It is much too early to gauge the impact of Nagel’s
Mind and Cosmos
, but it is nonetheless notable—together with Paul Davies’s
The Goldilocks Enigma
, which argues for a “life principle” in the universe—as yet another example of what we might call the “what is missing?” genre in recent philosophy.

THE UNSATISFIABILITY OF LIFE

Imaginative and provocative as
Mind and Cosmos
is, however, from our point of view it is more instructive to return for a moment to
The View from Nowhere
, where Nagel says that we have to live not just within the predicament of being on the edge of language, but with the realization that natural selection does not explain everything.

There are three possible routes out of the impasse he identifies. Rather, what he actually says is that there is
no
way out but there are “adjustments” we can make “to live with the conflict.” One, tried in the past, is to withdraw from the specifics of human life as much as possible, “minimize the area of one’s local contact with the world and concentrate on the universal”—contemplation, meditation, abandonment of worldly ambition—so that we achieve “a withering away of the ego.” He suggests this is a high price to pay for spiritual harmony. “The amputation of so much of oneself to secure the unequivocal affirmation of the rest seems a waste of consciousness.”

The second adjustment is the opposite of the first: “a denial of the objective unimportance of our lives, which will justify full engagement from the objective standpoint.” This is in many ways the narcissist’s view; the extent to which it can fail was discussed earlier, when it was suggested that narcissists sometimes have an unrealistic appreciation of their own abilities. The objective world is there, and always will be, whether we like it or not.

Nagel’s third adjustment is to accept that the dual vision—the coexistence of a subjective and an objective world—is part of our humanity, which means accepting that we cannot break free of the predicament—that is what being human, with consciousness and language,
means.
Objectivity
transcends
us, has a life of its own, is always changing, with implications for our subjective identity, including its limits.

One of the ways this predicament can be eased, if not escaped entirely, says Nagel, is to live a moral life. In so doing we seek to live as individuals who affirm the equal worth of other individuals. “The most general effect of the objective stance ought to be a form of humility; the recognition that you are no more important than you are, and the fact that something is of
importance to you, or that it would be good or bad if you did or suffered something, is a fact of purely local significance.” We don’t have to be pious about it, he says: humility falls between nihilistic detachment and blind self-importance. We must try to avoid the familiar excesses of envy, vanity, conceit, competitiveness and pride. “It is possible to live a complete life of the kind one has been given without overvaluing it hopelessly.”

To this he adds what he calls the “non-egocentric respect for the particular.” He is alluding here not just to the aesthetic response (though that is included too): “Particular things can have a noncompetitive completeness which is transparent to all aspects of the self. This also helps explain why the experience of great beauty tends to unify the self: the object engages us immediately and totally in a way that makes distinctions among points of view irrelevant. . . . It is hard to know whether one could sustain such an attitude consistently towards the elements of everyday life.”

To repress either side—the subjective or the objective—impoverishes life, he concludes. “It is better to be simultaneously engaged and detached, and therefore absurd, for this is the opposite of self-denial and the result of full awareness.”
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BELIEVING IS PUBLIC

Richard Rorty, who in chapter 24 was extolling the merits of “old chestnut” poetry, agreed with Nagel that the aim of life is full awareness, but he was convinced that it can be achieved only via our relations with other people. “The candidate for the most praiseworthy human capacity,” he said, prefiguring Sam Harris and Matt Ridley, “is the ability to trust and co-operate with others.” We must abandon the search for something stable outside of us (such as deities or universal human nature) and that we think provides us with an independent criterion for judging. On the contrary, there are no unconditional, transcultural moral obligations, rooted in an unchanging, ahistorical human nature. Being Darwinian, he said, means accepting a world where the aim is to devise tools that help us have less pain and more pleasure. By this account, the benefits of space travel and modern astronomy “outweigh the advantages of Christian fundamentalism.”
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Truth is not the goal of inquiry, whatever the churches or secular scholarship tell us. “The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do. All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavor to make life better.” The Enlightenment was mistaken when it replaced the idea of supernatural guidance with the idea of a “quasi-divine” faculty called “reason.” Reason involves choice and choice is invariably a compromise between competing goods, not between absolute right and absolute wrong; and the same applies to moral struggle. Likewise, the struggle for existence—there is no invisible tribunal of reason, just as there is no God. In this way we must hope that the human race will gradually come together as a community—this will be an evolutionary achievement, with consequences. We like to talk about our responsibility to truth or reason, but this must now be replaced by our responsibility to our fellow human beings.

Rorty believed that there has been, or is or ought to be, a paradigm shift from metaphysics to what he called “weak thought.” Whereas the metaphysical tradition has been dominated by the idea that there is something non-human that human beings should try to live up to, something grand and all-encompassing that provides the largest possible framework for discourse, “weak thought” acknowledges its limitations and “just wants to make finite little changes,” piecemeal reformulations rather than intellectual revolutions. Instead of claiming that their ideas stem from something profound, advocates of “weak thought” “put forward their ideas as suggestions that might be of use for certain particular purposes.”

The way to regard religion is as a “habit of action,” from which it follows that our principal concern must always be the extent to which the actions of religious believers frustrate the needs of others—this is what matters, rather than the extent to which religion gets something right. “Our obligation to be rational is exhausted by our obligation to take account of other people’s doubts and objections to our beliefs.” The truth is not some absolute but, rather, “what would be better for us to believe.” The religious believer has a right to his or her faith only insofar as it does not conflict with his or her intellectual responsibilities. Believers’ need to justify their beliefs arises only when their habits of action interfere with the fulfillment of others’ needs. This means that religion is inevitably privatized. If a private relationship with God is not accompanied by claims to knowledge
of the divine will, there may be no conflict between religion and utilitarian ethics. But there is a duty not to believe without evidence: “A belief accepted without evidence is a stolen pleasure.”
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That said, there is no way that a religious person can claim the right to believe as part of an overall right to privacy—because believing is inherently a public project: “All language-users are in it together.” We all have the responsibility, Rorty says, not to believe anything that cannot be justified to the rest of us. “To be rational is to submit one’s beliefs—all one’s beliefs—to one’s peers.” Other, non-cognitive states—such as desires and hopes—can be held without evidence, but belief cannot.

Whereas science gives us the ability to predict and control, religion holds up before us a larger hope, something to live for (Rorty’s words). “To ask which of the two accounts of the universe is true may be as pointless as asking: Is the carpenter’s or the particle physicist’s account of tables the true one? Neither needs to be answered if they can keep out of each other’s way.” Moreover, people have a right to faith, just as they have a right to fall in love, to marry in haste and to persist in love despite endless sorrow and disappointment.

Scientific realism and religious fundamentalism, Rorty contends, are products of the same “urge,” the attempt to convince people that they have a duty to develop what Bernard Williams calls “an absolute conception of reality.” But, claims Rorty, both scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are “private projects which have got out of hand,” having become attempts to make one’s own private way of giving meaning to one’s own life obligatory for the general public.

The contemporary pragmatist philosophy of religion, therefore, must make a sharp distinction between faith and belief. Rorty argues that Tillichians strive not toward some elaborate creed or doctrine, not to produce any
specific
habit of action, but rather “to make the sort of difference to a human life which is made by the presence or absence of love.” (Echoes here of Robert Musil’s “other condition.”) He draws a parallel between Tillich’s religion and being in love with someone the rest of us can’t love. “We do not mock a mother who loves her psychopathic child, [William] James said, on the same basis we should not mock people who say ‘the best things are the more eternal things.’”
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