Thomas Nagel 

Believing What We Want

By David Feddes

We believe what we want. When we don’t believe in God, it’s because we don’t want him. The biggest barrier to knowing God is not lack of evidence but lack of desire. Until the heart loves God, the mind avoids him.

Thomas Nagel doesn’t believe in God. Professor Nagel teaches philosophy and law at New York University. He has degrees from Oxford and Harvard. He admits that some things may point to God’s reality, but Thomas Nagel wants God not to exist, and he believes what he wants. He says,

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… 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.

Professor Nagel says he has a “cosmic authority problem.” He doesn’t want a world where everything owes its existence to God and where everyone must answer to God. He thinks others have a similar authority problem. They use “evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind,” says Nagel. These explanations often defy common sense, but they are appealing because they eliminate God from the picture. Nagel says, “Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.”

Harvard biologist Richard Lewinton rejects God not because of evidence or logic but because of what he calls “a prior commitment.” Lewinton says, “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.” Why choose a godless theory that sounds far-fetched instead of ideas of divine design and purpose? Because God is ruled out from the start. This commitment “is absolute,” says Lewinton, “for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

Unbelief is not based on evidence but on choosing a basic stance before considering any evidence. First the heart dislikes God; then the mind explains God away. We believe what we want.