Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:25:46.373Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

On Thomas Nagel's Rejection of Theism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2013

David Baggett*
Affiliation:
Liberty University

Extract

In his most recent book—Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False—and in numerous places in his previous work, Thomas Nagel wishes to suggest several reasons that theism is not a live option for him (to use a phrase made famous by William James). He does not seem to intend many of his criticisms to be more than suggestive, much less decisive; nonetheless, in light of the strength of his conviction that theism is somehow inherently too outrageous an option to believe, I would like to spend a bit of time identifying and assessing the criticisms he mentions.

Type
Review Essay*
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

ThomasNagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

References

1 See Plantinga's trilogy on warrant: Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

2 Plantinga, Alvin, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nagel published his review of Plantinga's book as “A Philosopher Defends Religion,” The New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012, 62–63.

3 Moreland, James Porter, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (London: SCM Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

4 Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

5 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 123.

6 Nagel cites Broad, Charlie Dunbar's The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge, 1925) 8194Google Scholar and Bergson, Henri's Creative Evolution (trans. Arthur Mitchell; New York: Henry Holt, 1911)Google Scholar.

7 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 7.

8 Ibid., 21.

9 Ibid., 25.

12 Ibid., 26.

14 Lewis, C. S., Miracles, in C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002) 297–462, at 354Google Scholar.

16 Ibid. [italics in original].

18 Ibid., 376.

19 Ibid., 383.

20 Ibid., 385.

21 Ibid., 386.

23 Ibid., 387.

24 Ibid., 388.

26 Ibid., 389.

27 Ibid., 395.

28 Ibid., 395–96 [italics in original].

29 Ibid., 401.