Doubting Materialism

Materialism is the theory that matter is all that exists. From a materialist’s perspective, all aspects of mind and consciousness — including our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and intentions — are believed to result from nothing more than electrochemical impulses in our brains. A corollary of this perspective is that many aspects of our everyday human experience – including mental causation, free will, and our sense of self – are mere illusions, simple by-products of our neural and bodily machinery. The materialist viewpoint was articulated rather bluntly by Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA), who said: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Or, as Marvin Minsky (one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence) put it: “The human brain is just a computer that happens to be made out of meat.”

The materialist perspective contrasts rather sharply with the religious belief that human beings are children of God. While different religions may teach different things about exactly what it means to be a child of God, I think it’s safe to say that most, if not all, religions agree that humans are much more than computers made of meat.

So it’s not surprising that a religious person like myself would be skeptical of materialism. It is, however, surprising that someone like NYU philosophy professor Thomas Nagel would be skeptical of materialism. Nagel, you see, is a committed atheist. He has expressed this rather forcefully, saying: “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” 

And yet, in his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel confesses that

for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe. … [I]t seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.

Nagel finds it “puzzling” that materialism is “taken as more or less self-evident,” seeing the widespread acceptance of materialism as “a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense.” To Nagel, materialism “is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.” He believes there are good reasons to believe that materialism is “false, and not just around the edges.” Nagel sees the materialist worldview as “ripe for displacement” because “there is a lot it can’t explain.”

I see that creationists and advocates of intelligent design have praised Nagel’s book. But Nagel is not denying evolution. He fully acknowledges that “we are products of the long history of the universe since the big bang, descended from bacteria over billions of years of natural selection.” At the same time, Nagel believes that our current materialist understanding of how evolution works is incomplete. Nagel is calling for “a revision of the Darwinian picture rather than an outright denial of it.”

The starting point for Nagel’s argument is that materialism cannot provide an adequate explanation of consciousness or mental functions such as thought, reasoning, and evaluation. But Nagel goes farther than this:

[I]f the mental … cannot be fully explained by physical science … it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those aspects of our physical constitution that bring with them the mental cannot be fully explained by physical science either. … So if mind is a product of biological evolution … then biology cannot be a purely physical science.  

In other words, since materialism cannot adequately explain the appearance of consciousness, thought, reasoning, and evaluation, “the materialist version of evolutionary theory cannot be the whole truth. … [M]aterialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world.”

In essence, Nagel is arguing for an “enlarged conception of reality” in which “mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature.” Nagel acknowledges that he doesn’t have a definite alternative to materialism in mind, but he is willing to speculate about several possibilities, including the notion that “there are natural teleological laws governing the development of organization over time.”

How different is Nagel’s perspective from what Mormonism teaches? At a surface level, it may appear that they are radically different, since Nagel “do[es] not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view.”

But it’s important to note how Nagel defines theism. He says: “If God exists, he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not governed by natural laws.” Elsewhere, Nagel says: “At the outer bounds of the world, encompassing everything in it, including the law-governed natural order revealed by science, theism places some kind of mind or intention, which is responsible for both the physical and the mental character of the universe” (emphasis mine).

As I discussed in a previous post, however, Mormonism does not teach that God created everything in the universe; instead, God worked with pre-existing materials in creating the universe and in creating humans. Thus, within Mormonism, it appears that even God is subservient to certain natural laws of the universe. So although Nagel purports to reject theism, he is not necessarily rejecting the type of theism advanced by Mormonism.

Nagel’s suggestion that “mind is … a basic aspect of nature” seems similar to something else that Mormon scripture teaches: “Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29).

By rejecting materialism, Nagel acknowledges that he is opening himself to “a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.” In that idea I see hints of this basic teaching from Mormonism: “We are part of a divine plan designed by Heavenly Parents who love us.” To what extent does a “cosmic predisposition” differ from a “divine plan”?

Nagel’s book has, not surprisingly, met with widespread criticism. But my faith is that Nagel might just be onto something.