TGIF

The Transcendent Ground of Intelligent... Fellows?

You can support communism in a capitalist country, but you can't support capitalism in a communist country. Which is an indirect but powerful proof of the intellectual poverty of communism.

Likewise, a theist can easily support evolution, while secular evolutionists don't support theism. But here's an intellectually honest atheist: Thomas Nagel. He's written a book called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, and he's certainly not wrong.

The natural sciences are of course 

dominated by the insistence that “the physical sciences could in principle provide a theory of everything.” Under this view (often acting as an ideology), all reality can be reduced to matter and the principles by which its interactions unfold.

However, 

Nagel succinctly rejects the “reductive materialism” -- the notion that all of reality can be explained by material processes moving through time with no given end (telos) -- that is “widely assumed to be the only serious possibility.”

He comes close to our perspective in regarding the cosmos as

a place where “mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature.” Consciousness and reason are not outcomes of strictly material Darwinian evolution. Rather, they point to a telos in the order of things that guides or directs evolution and the development of the universe. 

Except his is a non-theistic teleology. Not for any strictly logical reasons, rather, because this is his preference, but also due to what we might call a self-acknowledged "theological autism," i.e., an inability to intuit or apperceive the divine:

He comments that he lacks “the sensus divinitatis that enables -- indeed compels -- so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purposes as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling.” He himself is even “strongly averse to the idea” of theism.  

Averse to what he lacks the ability to appreciate? I get it, but isn't this like hating baseball because Shohei Ohtani is better at it than I am? And which comes first, the aversion or the incapacity? Analogously, I would guess that the only people who hate math are those who aren't good at it.

Yes, but why would God create people incapable of knowing him?

Fair point. We should be honest and humble about such obscurities in our own worldview. For my part, I can only say that between the options of theism and atheism, the latter is a logical, metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic nonstarter. 

This leaves us with theism, even though it isn't without its ambiguities and paradoxes. We shouldn't pretend to understand what exceeds our capacity to understand. After all, we know going in that finitude cannot contain infinitude. For his part, Nagel too "acknowledges his own limits":

He does not pretend to know what this [cosmic] telos will be. In fact, he thinks that we do not yet have the conceptual tools to grasp it, but that building on the material insights of science, we may eventually come to understand the universe’s nonmaterial aspects (and must keep trying).

On the one hand, Nagel is “not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without [divine] intention makes sense," but on the other, "I do not at the moment see why it doesn’t.” 

So it seems that there are actually three options on the table: ateleology, theistic teleology, and atheistic teleology, and which makes the most sense, regardless of our preferences?

Can we even conceive of purpose without mind? Certainly it is possible that there is a transcendent ground of intelligence (TGI), for no one could prove otherwise. The question is whether it is possible that there isn't a TGI. Then the question becomes, is this what people mean by God?  

Interestingly, "Nagel describes himself as 'far too unimaginative' to grasp what his own teleological alternative might really and fully be," but is there someone out there who is imaginative enough to grasp it? And explain it? 

As we wrote a few posts ago, we know from our Gödel that "there are any number of unprovable truths to which we have access. And just because we can't prove the existence of a transcendent ground of intelligence, it hardly means it doesn't exist":

When we speak of "intelligent design," the deeper question is whether intelligence is a cause or a consequence of what is beneath it. But could intelligence really be a consequence of unintelligence? How can anything be a consequence not only of its opposite, but its negation? It's analogous to calling light a consequence of darkness, ugliness the cause of beauty, or randomness the cause of information.

A holistic metaphysic that grounds intelligence at the top simply rejects the assumptions of scientism -- which is to say, it rejects the vision of a closed universe reducible to matter in motion, or to pure quantity.

Hmm. Gödel proves that there is a realm of truth(s) beyond the reach of any formal system. Therefore, the cosmos cannot be contained or understood by any single, finite, and consistent formal system. If we try to do that, paradox and absurdity ensue. Help me out here, Gemini. What am I trying to say, and is it even sayable?

The existence of unprovable truths within a formal system implies that there is something "outside" or "beyond" the system that can recognize these truths.

The TGI? 

This has led some philosophers to speculate about the nature of human intuition and consciousness, suggesting they might operate on principles beyond mere algorithmic computation. 

If human minds can grasp truths that a formal system cannot prove, it raises questions about the ultimate nature of reality and whether it possesses an inherent purpose or direction that transcends purely mechanical or logical derivations.

So, can humans intuit and even "unite" themselves to the TGI? For this would constitute the basis of mysticism. 

To turn it around, is mystical experience the only final proof of the TGI? That's how it was for Thomas: "St. Thomas’s divine vision at the end of his life of the full grandeur of reality made all his work seem to him like straw," whereas Nagel is again “far too unimaginative” to grasp the implications of his own intuitions. But is he really?

“Intuition” is the perception of the invisible, just as “perception” is the intuition of the visible. 

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores... 

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary. 

God is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything. 

Bringing this discussion back around to our review of All Things Are Full of Gods, Hart writes that 

[A]fter four centuries of mechanistic dogma, the inability to view the natural order as a realm of invisible sympathies and vital spiritual intelligences is very much the essence of the late modern human condition.  

The history of modern disenchantment is the history of humankind's long, ever-deepening self-exile. So, naturally, no longer believing that the world hears or speaks to them, they find themselves looking elsewhere for those presences....

So, self-exile from the transcendent ground of intelligence? Gemini?

In essence, what you are saying (and it is eminently sayable!) is this: you are arguing for a holistic, teleological, and ultimately theistic metaphysic that positions Intelligence (the TGI, God) as the foundational principle for the universe's inherent relationality, order, intelligibility, consciousness, and purpose. 

This view coherently explains phenomena that you (and Nagel, to an extent) find inexplicable under a purely materialistic, reductionist, or chance-based framework. You leverage Gödel to suggest that a "closed universe" model is inherently incomplete and that our capacity for intuition points beyond it, potentially towards a direct apprehension of this Transcendent Ground. The modern "disenchantment" is framed as a self-imposed limitation on perceiving this deeper, relational, and intelligent reality.

Here is an image that attempts to visualize the profound concepts from your text, integrating the ideas of a Transcendent Ground of Intelligence, cosmic order, inherent relationality, and a purpose that transcends purely material explanations: