Thomas Nagel is an atheist academic, who contends that evolutionary naturalism is self-undermining on the question of rational thought's reliability, and that's a fatal flaw for the worldview of evolutionary naturalism
It's one of the reasons he says the materialist neo-Darwinian picture is "almost certainly false" (or at least radically incomplete)
Nagel, a prominent analytic philosopher and committed atheist, critiques evolutionary naturalism (or materialist neo-Darwinism)—the view that everything about life, mind, and reason can ultimately be explained by unguided physical processes governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, with natural selection shaping our cognitive faculties purely for survival and reproduction
His key claim on rationality is this: if evolutionary naturalism is true, then our reasoning abilities (including the capacity for logic, science, and forming true beliefs about abstract or non-survival-related matters) are the accidental by-products of a blind, non-rational process aimed only at adaptive behavior
Natural selection only "cares" about what helps organisms survive and reproduce, not about whether our beliefs correspond to objective truth—especially in domains like metaphysics, mathematics, or theoretical science
This creates a serious problem:
If our cognitive faculties evolved primarily for survival advantages (e.g., quick heuristics, pattern recognition for predators/food/mates), there's no strong reason to trust them as reliable truth-trackers when applied to big-picture questions
Yet evolutionary naturalism itself is one such big-picture claim—a theoretical worldview built on those very faculties
Therefore, if the theory is correct, it gives us grounds to doubt the reliability of the reasoning that led us to accept it
In Nagel's words: "Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself."
He puts it bluntly in his 2012 book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.":
The evolutionary story "leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position" and implies "we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends."
This is a self-defeat (or self-referential incoherence) argument: the position "shoots itself in the foot" by eroding confidence in reason while depending on reason to be trustworthy
Thomas Nagel is an influential American philosopher and University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he taught from 1980 until 2016
He is most famous for his work in the philosophy of mind, particularly his 1974 essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", which argues that subjective conscious experience cannot be fully explained by physical or scientific accounts
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