Hugleiðingar Thomas Nagel um efnishyggju Þróunarsinnans

Ég hef fjallað áður stuttlega um Thomas Nagel, sjá: Virtur guðleysingi yfirgefur hið sökkvandi skip darwinisma 

Ég er í vandræðum með þetta enska hugtak "materialist", bein þýðing er efnishyggja en það er að gefa til kynna einhvern sem er aðeins með hugan við efnislega hluti eins og flottan bíl og íbúð.  Efnishyggja er samt orðið sem er notað á wikipedia, sjá:http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efnishyggja 

Hugtakið aftur á móti sú afstaða að það eina sem er til í heiminum er hið efnislega. Sem sagt, enginn Guð eða eitthvað yfirnáttúrulegt.  Svo, ef einhver er með eitthvað betra orð yfir þetta, endilega láttu mig vita.

Mig langar að benda á nokkuð sem Nagel sagði í bók sinni um guðleysis efnishyggju:

Thomas Nagel's Mind & Cosmos
If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious. 

[T]he materialist assumption works really, really well -- in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.

But the success has gone to the materialists' heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can't quantify something, it doesn't exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial "manifest image" of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.

Here materialism bumps up against itself. Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them. Reductive materialism doesn't account for the "brute facts" of existence -- it doesn't explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from nonlife. Closer to home, it doesn't plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren't. These failures, Nagel says, aren't just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. "There is little or no possibility," he writes, "that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics."

It can perform calculus, hypothesize metaphysics, compose music -- even develop a theory of evolution. None of these higher capacities has any evident survival value, certainly not hundreds of thousands of years ago when the chief aim of mental life was to avoid getting eaten. Could our brain have developed and sustained such nonadaptive abilities by the trial and error of natural selection, as neo-Darwinism insists? It's possible, but the odds, Nagel says, are "vanishingly small." If Nagel is right, the materialist is in a pickle. The conscious brain that is able to come up with neo-Darwinism as a universal explanation simultaneously makes neo-Darwinism, as a universal explanation, exceedingly unlikely.

As a philosophy of everything [materialism] is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it's lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions -- understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots -- wouldn't just be a materialist: He'd be a psychopath.

Eitthvað segir mér að það er að koma flóðbylgja af guðleysingjum sem eru að fara að yfirgefa þessa órökréttu hugmyndafræði sem stenst ekki alvöru íhugun.