THOMAS NAGEL AND ARISTOTELIAN-THOMISTIC TELEOLOGY

Abstract

The materialistic conception of the world, buttressed by the Theory of Evolution, has been opposed to the proof for the existence of God through the order of the universe (the fifth way of St. Thomas Aquinas). Although the Darwinian explanation of the world is not directly opposed to the existence of God, some of its contemporary formulations (Dawkins, Gould, Wilson and Lewontin, for example) make of atheism a starting point. In this context, the recent publication of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is almost certainly false, by Thomas Nagel has been the subject of disputation. The author affirms that it is possible to discover order in the natural world but does not go so far as to posit the existence of a Creator. In this paper Nagel’s notions of natural order will be examined and compared to those of Aristotelian-Thomistic natural philosophy, in order to make clear the basis of Nagel’s critique of Darwinism and to understand what kind of teleology does his theory advance.