The Human Question

I'm listening to J Budziszewski's What we Can't not Know  and I was amazed by his quote from Thomas Nagel's The Last Word , where the latter admits that atheism has motivations that are not entirely free of wishful thinking: "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.” says Nagel.  This is really an amazing quote.  See also Nagel's mention of the "ridiculous overuse of (r)evolutionary biology"... more on this later.

Natural scientists aspire to be able to explain nature in quantitative terms : that is, terms of its common sensible characteristics as well as the force, and other quantifiable characteristics needed to explain changes in common sensible characteristics. out the recognition of the qualitative features of experience. Thomas Nagel recognized this problem in his article "What's it like to be a Bat?" That article points out that scientific knowledge of how a bat perceives can never convey the experience that a bat has from a bat's point of view. These perceptual notes are called qualia what it's like for a to perceive, so that if we never perceive things the way a bat does, we wouldn't know how to point out that part of nature that indicates that, when you've then you will leave out the recognition of the qualitative features of nature or experience, including the proper-sensibles. But that is not to say that these qualia are immaterial. Rather, it ma...