Lots of intellectuals presume they ‘know’ it is impossible to deconstruct the received wisdom about how Darwinism, the natural worldview, and science are intertwined. Truth is, it requires patient dedication and a wide-ranging inquiry. But it is not really rocket science. The big obstacle is not the intellectual immensity of the endeavor, but the scalding ridicule and heresy indictments you will have to endure from the orthodoxy police if you ever speak up about it. I first wrote this in 2015. Before this blog took a sort of — poetic — turn.

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The subtitle of Thomas Nagel’s 2012 book, “Mind and Cosmos”, makes evident why it unleashed such a stir within the scientific and philosophical establishments: ‘Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False’. That’s two sacred cows skewered in one fell swoop, the first a kind of hidden dogma not generally exposed to the light of agoric day, and the second a beloved and enshrined foundational darling! What made things worse was that Nagel was/is a serious respected philosopher with decades of establishment credibility, including avowed atheism, prompting figures like Pinker and Dennett to publicly wonder what had gotten into their old colleague. Nagel’s book is not an easy read. You have to keep awake on every page, go slowly, and double back sometimes. Due to this and the ensuing ruckus, he offered a short clarifying summary of the book’s core thesis in a brief NY Times essay a year later, which is the subject of this current article.
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