I Exist, but not for long

In the current issue of the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson has an article entitled "The Heretic," (about which I might have more to say later) concerning the lambasting philosopher Thomas Nagel has been taking from his fellow metaphysicians, the vast majority of whom stake their tents in the desert of atheism. Nagel is suffering at their hands - most often in articles and blog posts that appear to be the cyber and print versions of drive-by shootings - because the subtitle of his new book, Mind and Cosmos, is Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Since Nagel is himself an atheist, why the molecule-obsessed, materialist, naturalist, reductionist phalanx of the philosophical world should leap as one to repudiate him is a question some might like the answer to. (Suspicion: the molecularists have become so dependent on Darwinism as the scientific underpinning to their nihilism that any shade of doubt must be perceived as a mortal threat to the entire edifice. It appears their ideas can't stand on their own.)

Near article's end, Ferguson quotes Nagel:

If I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true, the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith.

Says Ferguson: "He admits that he finds the evident failure of materialism as a worldview alarming - precisely because the alternative is, for a secular intellectual, unthinkable. He calls this intellectual tic 'fear of religion.' "

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear. 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.

Now, I like Nagel. It's hard not to like a man who seems not merely to value honesty, but to practice it. Furthermore, much of his work is clearly written and accessible to us commoners. And I am literally grateful to him for his famous essay, "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" But it seems to me a philosopher ought not to be thinking in a manner betrayed by the above-quoted words. I think Aquinas described philosophy as that attempt to discover the truth of things. In its pursuit, should the thinker cast his lot with one side or the other before beginning? (I'm assuming that he has no fixed belief either way, that the state of his convictions would be best described as 'agnostic'.) Aside from the fact that I have trouble understanding a cast of mind that would rather there were no God and, consequently, no immortality for those he loves, shouldn't he in fact not care where the truth lies, but only pursue it honestly from premise to premise until a conclusion is arrived at, embracing it whatever it might be? Though reviled by his fellow materialists, Nagel is one himself. The phenomenon of consciousness, that subjective prism through which we view the world (sometimes, I believe, called "qualia" by philosophers), and without which none of us could say "I exist," is in the end a material thing. Some materialists might admit its objective reality, but it must keep its date with annihilation like all things material. It has no lasting worth. Why would a philosopher who believes this as an ultimate objective truth allow a subjective frame of mind to color his inquiry before it even begins? What motivates a mind that knows its destiny is oblivion to want to prove that fact?

It seems to me that he would only do this if he were leaving open the possibility that he might be wrong.
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Of interest on the subject: Ed Feser, who is actually mentioned in Ferguson's article, has a series of posts defending Nagel's book against the atheist onslaught. I don't have time to link each one, but if you scroll a little on his page they're easy to find.