Person

Thomas Nagel

American philosopher (b. 1937); University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University; one of the most influential analytic philosophers of mind of the last half-century. Nagel is a lifelong atheist who is nonetheless among the sharpest critics of reductive materialism. His 1974 paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a landmark statement of the irreducibility of consciousness, and his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos argues that the standard materialist neo-Darwinian account cannot in principle explain mind, cognition, or value. Because Nagel is not a theist, these positions make him a valuable hostile witness for the codex: he grants the core apologetic premises about the limits of materialism, and he has candidly admitted that his own atheism is partly a matter of what he wants to be true.

Biography

1937, Born in Belgrade, then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, to a German-Jewish family that later emigrated to the United States
Cornell University, undergraduate study, where he was drawn toward analytic philosophy and the influence of Wittgensteinian and ordinary-language currents
University of Oxford, BPhil, studying in the environment shaped by J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice
Harvard University, PhD, written under the political philosopher John Rawls
Taught at the University of California, Berkeley, then at Princeton University
Spent the bulk of his career at New York University, where he held a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law and is now University Professor Emeritus

Major works

The Possibility of Altruism (1970), his first book, arguing that reasons for action have an objective, agent-neutral character
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), published in The Philosophical Review, his most famous paper
The View from Nowhere (1986), on the tension between the subjective first-person standpoint and the objective view science aims at
The Last Word (1997), a defense of the objectivity of reason against subjectivist and relativist reduction
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012), his most controversial book

"What is it like to be a bat?" and the irreducibility of consciousness

Nagel's 1974 paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is one of the most cited works in modern philosophy of mind. Its core claim is simple to state and hard to answer:

An organism has conscious experience if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism, something it is like for the organism itself.
A bat navigates by echolocation, a sensory modality humans do not possess. We can describe its neurophysiology exhaustively in third-person physical terms, yet still not grasp what the bat's experience is like from the inside.
Conscious experience therefore has an essentially subjective character, a first-person point of view, that no purely physical or functional third-person description captures.

The upshot is a standing obstacle to reductive physicalism. Any account that identifies mental states with physical or functional states leaves out precisely the subjective quality that makes them conscious states at all. Nagel's paper is one of the classic statements of what David Chalmers later named the hard problem of consciousness: even a complete physical account of the brain does not explain why there is subjective experience accompanying it.

For the codex, this is a concession from a non-theist that reductive materialism cannot close the explanatory gap between physical description and conscious experience. See Argument from Consciousness, Mind, Soul, Consciousness, and Materialism.

The candid admission (fear of religion)

In The Last Word (1997), Nagel wrote one of the most quoted admissions in modern atheist literature:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. 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.

Nagel calls this his "fear of religion," a disposition he says goes deeper than the assessment of arguments. The apologetic value is direct. A leading atheist philosopher openly concedes that his atheism is partly a matter of want, not solely of evidence. That admission defeats the common pose of atheism as pure, disinterested rationality, the view from nowhere applied to the God question. If a first-rate philosopher grants that he does not want theism to be true, then unbelief is not automatically the neutral default that follows the evidence; it can be, and here by its own testimony is, shaped by prior desire.

This is the point John Lennox presses in conversation with Stephen Meyer. Lennox notes that Nagel "doesn't want there to be a god. Well, of course, that's not a scientific position." The concession fits the broader will-to-disbelieve theme: unbelief can be motivated by what a person hopes is the case, not only by what the arguments establish. It does not prove theism, but it removes the presumption that atheism alone is the rational, evidence-only stance and everything else is wishful thinking. The same charge of motivated belief cuts both ways, and Nagel has honestly said so of himself. See Naturalism.

Mind and Cosmos and the revolt against materialism

In Mind and Cosmos (2012), Nagel, still writing as an atheist, argues that the standard materialist neo-Darwinian picture of nature cannot in principle account for three things:

Consciousness, the emergence of subjective experience, which he had already argued in 1974 resists physical reduction.
Cognition, our capacity to grasp objective truth and to reason our way to it. If our faculties are only the output of a blind process selected for survival, it is not clear why they should track truth about logic, mathematics, or the deep structure of the world.
Objective value, the reality of moral and evaluative truths that the reductive story treats as illusion or projection.

Nagel's proposal is not theism. He suspects instead that nature is in some way oriented toward the appearance of mind, a kind of natural teleology built into the world without a designer standing behind it. He explicitly declines to endorse either theism or Intelligent Design. But he defends the Intelligent Design theorists' right to raise their questions, and he says they should not be dismissed as beneath serious engagement. That single gesture, from an atheist of his standing, drew a fierce response. New Atheist and materialist reviewers attacked the book sharply, some treating it as a betrayal or an embarrassment.

The apologetic angle is that a hostile witness has conceded the load-bearing premise of two Christian arguments at once. The Argument from Reason holds that naturalism cannot ground the reliability of the reasoning by which naturalism itself is affirmed. The Argument from Consciousness holds that mind is not the kind of thing a purely material process produces. Nagel grants both premises, that materialism cannot explain reason and cannot explain consciousness, while refusing the theistic conclusion. His refusal is exactly what makes the concession weigh. He has no apologetic motive to admit these limits; he admits them because he thinks the arguments force it. See Intelligent Design.

In the codex's apologetic

Nagel supplies the codex two hostile-witness moves:

The admission of want. From The Last Word, a prominent atheist concedes that he hopes there is no God and calls it his fear of religion. This undercuts the framing of atheism as evidence-only rationality.
The revolt against materialism. From "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and Mind and Cosmos, a prominent atheist argues that materialist neo-Darwinism cannot explain consciousness, reason, or value, the very premises Christian philosophers use in the Argument from Consciousness and the Argument from Reason.

Steel-manned, Nagel is honest, technically rigorous, and not a theist. He is not conceding to help the theist; he concedes because he follows the arguments where he thinks they lead and stops short of God on independent grounds. That is precisely why his concessions weigh more, not less. A theist granting the limits of materialism proves little; an atheist granting them, against his own stated preference, is testimony under interest.

The codex frames the use as reciprocal concession, the house pattern for the defeater cluster. Grant Nagel his atheism in full. In exchange, collect the two larger concessions it comes attached to: that his atheism is admittedly a matter of what he wants, and that on his own analysis materialism cannot explain the mind. The theist can accept the smaller point and keep the larger ones, because the larger ones are exactly the ground the theist wanted to stand on.