By Joseph R. Wood

My summer philosophical reading includes two Thomases: St. Thomas Aquinas, who needs no introduction here, and Thomas Nagel, New York University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus. He is an atheist of Jewish descent.

Whatever you read in the next few paragraphs, don't believe that Nagel is a quasi-Catholic philosopher. His book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, has to be enjoyed on his own terms.

Nagel succinctly rejects the "reductive materialism" - the notion that all of reality can be explained by material processes moving through time with no given end (telos) - that is "widely assumed to be the only serious possibility."

The natural sciences are dominated by the insistence that "the physical sciences could in principle provide a theory of everything." Under this view (often acting as an ideology), all reality can be reduced to matter and the principles by which its interactions unfold.

Nagel admires the physical sciences as they seek to understand reality within their domains. But he rejects the possibility that material causes alone could bring into being animals with consciousness and reason. He labels such theories "causal" explanations of what is.

He sees in the universe a place where "mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature." Consciousness and reason are not outcomes of strictly material Darwinian evolution. Rather, they point to a telos in the order of things that guides or directs evolution and the development of the universe.

This is a "teleological" explanation of reality. One kind of teleological view is theist, with God invoked as the propagator of the telos, or as the telos Himself.

Nagel is sympathetic to the arguments of those theists who, accepting an intelligent design of creation, point out logical and evidential flaws of materialist reduction theories. These arguments are often dismissed as unworthy of consideration merely because they are religious.

The reigning material Darwinists "are armed to the teeth against arguments from religion." The objections to material reductionism are, says Nagel, worthy of consideration on logical and philosophical grounds. But the materialists close their ears for no sound reason.

Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems these iconoclasts [critics of materialist reductionism] pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.

When I see an atheist philosopher referring to the "orthodox scientific consensus" as an icon and its religious critics as unfairly maligned "iconoclasts," I know I'm reading an interesting book. I'd like to have listened to Nagel chat with Chesterton.

Nagel says a great deal about why the materialist explanations fail to explain consciousness and reason. But he's circumspect about why the theist teleological explanation - God - doesn't convince him. He comments that he lacks "the sensus divinitatis that enables - indeed compels - so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purposes as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling." He himself is even "strongly averse to the idea" of theism.

That is one example of what a lovely book this is. Nagel writes with clarity, occasional humor, and generosity. He treats those of different views seriously and respectfully, often having interesting arguments. He acknowledges the importance of individual inclinations in how we see the world. The book moves along with charity and humility.

His penchant for common sense is welcome.

If causal and theist explanations of reality don't work for Nagel, what explains "what is"? He is drawn to a natural (versus supernatural) teleology in which the telos of the universe is embedded within nature itself (but not put the...