IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR THEIR BELIEF, WHAT DO THEY HAVE BUT GROUPTHINK?:

 For the bargain-basement atheism of our day, it is not enough that there be no God: there must be only matter. Now Nagel's new book fulfills his old warning. A mob is indeed forming, a mob of materialists, of free-thinking inquisitors. "In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against religion," Nagel calmly writes, "... I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world." This cannot be allowed! And so the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Secular Faith sprang into action. "If there were a philosophical Vatican," Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, "the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index." I hope that one day he regrets that sentence. It is not what Bruno, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Kant, and the other victims of the anti-philosophical Vatican had in mind.

I understand that nobody is going to burn Nagel's book or ban it. These inquisitors are just more professors. But he is being denounced not merely for being wrong. He is being denounced also for being heretical. [...]

The most shabby aspect of the attack on Nagel's heterodoxy has been its political motive. His book will be "an instrument of mischief," it will "lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism," and so on. It is bad for the left's own culture war. Whose side is he on, anyway? Almost taunting the materialist left, which teaches skepticism but not self-skepticism, Nagel, who does not subscribe to intelligent design, describes some of its proponents as "iconoclasts" who "do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met." I find this delicious, because it defies the prevailing regimentation of opinion and exemplifies a rebellious willingness to go wherever the reasoning mind leads. 

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