Mind and Cosmos: Why the Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Surely False by Thomas Nagel

The central argument of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Surely False by Thomas Nagel seems[1] to be as follows.

1. There are three possible and mutually exclusive explanations for the world and its contents: materialistic naturalism[2], theism[3], or teleological naturalism[4].
2. The correct explanation of the world and its contents is not materialistic naturalism.
3. The correct explanation of the world and its contents is not theism.
4. Therefore, the correct explanation is teleological naturalism.

Now, already a possible terminological confusion looms: isn’t it the case that teleological arguments are inevitably arguments for theism? Well, no, as it turns out. It becomes apparent as the book progresses that what Nagel is arguing for is an Aristotelian type of natural teleology: an immanent, this-worldly type of tendency or bias on the part of nature to produce certain ends. Such teleology does not posit any transcendent Mind in which intentions or goals reside.

The argument seems valid, and perhaps the first premise is relatively inoffensive to naturalist and theist alike. Argument will thus center on premises 2 and 3.

Sunday Quote: Thomas Nagel on Why There is Anything

"The existence of our universe might be explained by scientific cosmology, but such an explanation would still have to refer to features of some larger reality that contained or gave rise to it. A scientific explanation of the Big Bang would not be an explanation of why there was something rather than nothing, because it would have to refer to something from which that event arose. This something, or anything else cited in a further scientific explanation of it, would then have to be included in the universe whose existence we are looking for an explanation of when we ask why there is anything at all. This is a question that remains after all possible scientific questions have been answered."

- Thomas Nagel

"Why is there anything?" in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperment (Oxford University Press: 2009), p. 28. H/T: J.P. Moreland.