This book will please very few. Atheists will be, and have been, upset or bemused by one of their own rejecting the standard line of materialist reductionism and arguing instead for the irreducibility of consciousness, intentionality and value. They will certainly be perturbed by Nagel citing favourably members of the Intelligent Design community (p. 10) and overtly Christian philosophers, like Alvin Plantinga (p. 27). Nagel seems to be renouncing the sacred cows of materialism, such as intentionality being illusory and the universe being essentially valueless.
However Nagel is not converting. This is not his Damascus Road book. He says that he does not find theism credible, that he lacks the sense of the divine and that theism offers an incomplete explanation of the universe. This reaction is significant because most who see the implausibility of materialism feel compelled to adopt theism (or, at least, some form idealism) instead. However Nagel does not feel this compulsion. He will accept neither materialism nor theism: “that, at any rate, is my ungrounded intellectual preference” (p. 26).
What Nagel would like is a third way: something that, on the one hand, recognises the place of Mind and does not seek to reduce it to Matter and, on the other hand, does not require one to believe in God. As yet Nagel does not have a third way to articulate and has difficulty even sketching out what it would look like. He comments that it “will probably require a much more radical departure from the familiar forms of naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to conceive” (p. 127).
Yet given his failure to specify any particular problem with theism, except his general lack of belief in God, one wonders whether Nagel doesn’t protest too much. Perhaps thus we find agreement with his final remark (aimed at the current materialist consensus): “the human will to believe is inexhaustible” (p. 128).
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)