Explaining the natural order

Thomas Nagel is a leading secular philosopher who’s intellectually dissatisfied with the standard naturalistic paradigm. He’s written a book containing many trenchant criticisms of naturalism.

Yet he’s still an atheist. By his own admission, this is due, in part, to his personal aversion to the idea of God. He doesn’t want God to exist.

Although I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere, one reason for his antipathy towards God might be the fact he’s an Eastern European Jewish émigré. His atheism may be a reaction to historical European anti-Semitism. Or it may be that he can’t believe in a God who permitted so many Jews to perish in the Holocaust. I’m reminded of all those titles about the possibility (or not) of faith after Auschwitz.

His Jewishness might explain his interest in political philosophy, since many Jewish philosophers take a particular interest in social ethics. So his Jewish background might also account for his disillusionment with God–if, indeed, that’s the underlying source of his atheism.

The fact that he’s spent so much of his life in academia generally, and New York specifically, would reinforce his atheistic inclinations. His intellectual environment is pretty hostile to robust theism.

Over and above that, he raises an additional objection:

To my mind, apart from the difficulty of believing in God, the disadvantage of theism as an answer to the desire for comprehensive understanding is not that it offers no explanations but that it does not do so in the form of a comprehensive account of the natural order. Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order.

A theistic self-understanding, for those who find it compelling to see the world as the expression of divine intention, would leave intact our natural confidence in our cognitive faculties. But it would not be the kind of understanding that explains how beings like us fit into the world. The kind of intelligibility that would still be missing is intelligibility of the natural order itself–intelligibility from within. That kind of intelligibility may be compatible with some forms of theism–if God creates a self-contained natural order which he then leaves undisturbed. But it is not compatible with direct theistic explanation of systematic features of the world that would seem otherwise to be brute facts–such as the creation of life from dead matter, or the birth of consciousness, or reason. Such interventionist hypotheses amount to a denial that there is a comprehensive natural order.

T. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012), 25-26.

Nagel’s criterion seems to be aesthetic. Internal intelligibility is more elegant than intelligibility which requires an external frame of reference. 

Still, his objection is less than impressive. At one level, his objection amounts to the tautologous argument that theism is defective because it isn’t naturalistic enough. Theism is defective because it’s too theistic!

By definition, theism requires a distinction between the Creator and the created order.

In particular, he considers a theistic explanation of the natural order to be deficient because it fails to explain the natural order on its own terms. For him, an explanation of the natural order is inadequate unless it treats the natural order as ultimately self-explanatory. The natural order should contain its own raison d’etre. At least, that’s how I construe his objection.

Yet to say that’s a disadvantage of a theistic explanation begs the question. For if, as a matter of fact, the natural order is the end-result of a creative and interventionist God, then the theistic explanation is the correct explanation. How can the correct explanation be disadvantageous compared to an incorrect explanation?

Moreover, this isn’t distinctive to theistic explanations. Isn’t this a special case of causal explanations generally, including personal agency? Suppose we stipulate that a painting ought to be fully explicable on its own terms, without any reference to the painter.

But isn’t that quite arbitrary? Doesn’t that impose on the object a stipulative definition of what constitutes a satisfactory explanation of the object without regard to the actual nature of the object in question?

Not only does a painting require a painter to create the painting, but the painting reflects the artistic intent of the painter. His interpretation. The painting is a concrete projection of his viewpoint. 

To some degree the painting is meaningful on its own terms, but we can't exclude artistic intent. That external frame of reference is necessary to grasp the full significance of the painting.