Mind and Cosmos

"Unpleasantries"

Philosopher Thomas Nagel has written a telling little book.  The title says it all: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.  Nagel's point is that universal brute chance being responsible for the existence of everything becomes more and more unbelievable and incredible as our knowledge of the universe expands. 

Writes Nagel:

. . . for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist had to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works.  The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.  This is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist. 

Perhaps that literature presents the situation with a simplicity and confidence that does not reflect the most sophisticated scientific thought in these areas.  But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the produce of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.  [Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012),  p.5.]

Nagel goes on to state what he believes is lacking in the current argument as put forward by the materialist neo-Darwinians.
  It is an acknowledgement by the neo-Darwinians that their account of existence has a strong probability of being false.  He puts forward two critical questions:

There are two questions.  First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? [Ibid, p.6]

The more the complexity of even the most "simple" or "basic" cells becomes clear, the more pressing Nagel's first question becomes.  The probability of such mutual reinforcing complexity coming into existence by chance reduces exponentially. 

This leads to Nagel's second question:

In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist? [Ibid.]

There is, according to Nagel, lots of doubt and uncertainty in the scientific community about the first question. But once such "things" existed, it seems reasonable to speculate that "natural selection" could account for organisms naturally reproducing.  The core problem with this level of confidence, however, is that there is practically zero evidence of such developments to be found.  Consequently, the theory relies on "indirect evidence" and "general assumptions", rather than through hard evidence.

In other words the theory is speculative, not scientifically proven.