"Public Education and Intelligent Design," in Philosophy&Public Affairs, Vol. 36.

People wishing to read Thomas Nagel’s views, who have online access to journals or can get to them in the library, might wish to consider what he himself says, rather than try to discern it through a fog of ad hominems. Anyone who knows anything about the history of ideas is likely to agree with me that this is precisely the occasion where one reads the primary sources.

We sometimes distinguish local from global physicalism. The latter is the view that every fact in the universe is entirely a physical fact, which can be expressed in principle entirely in non-mentalistic terms. No one who believes in God, as traditionally conceived by Jews, Christians and Muslims, can be a global physicalist. Local physicalism is the view that every fact in some  domain of facts short of the entirety, is an entirely physical fact. For example, one might believe, as some Christians and Jews do, that the natural world is entirely physical, including human mentality. In nature, mentality is reducible to physicality, they maintain. God’s creation is entirely physical. Consequently creationists can readily accept physicalism in the philosophy of mind– for the standard reasons philosophers do.

Plenty of supporters of qualia, that is, philosophers and psychologists who claim that there are phenomenal and qualitative properties to experience, that there is something it is like to feel pain or taste sugar, are physicalists. They maintain that qualia are entirely explainable in terms of the physics of the brain, or physical relations between the brain and the environment, even if we don’t yet have the explanation in hand, and that none of the arguments against physicalism concerning qualia are any good.

So nothing prevents someone who believes that God created living things ( at least in a primitive,
 form) from maintaining that evolution explains human mentality.

I believe that people who reject physicalism about the mental, especially concerning qualia and perhaps intentionality, have difficulty with evolution as an account of human minds IF they also maintain that these mental properties are epiphenomenal. That is, evolution can select only for what makes a difference to behavior. As we know, evolution can produce all sorts of properties that it doesn’t select for, which are consequences of properties it does select for, e.g. the weight of the Polar bear’s coat wasn’t selected for, as it’s a disadvantage, but it is an inevitable consequence of the coat’s warmth, an advantage that was selected for. So it’s conceivable that the mind is merely a side effect of evolution, not selected for, but it’s awfully hard to believe.

Anti-physicalists about the mind who are fans of evolution have a powerful reason to maintain that extra physical states are causally efficacious, therefore, and make a difference to behavior. If they do they must give up what’s known as the ‘causal closure of the physical.’ That is, they must deny that the physics of the brain explains everything the brain does. Not inviting. Anti-physicalists unwilling to do this DO have a problem, IMO, unless they maintain that God simply arranged that the physical and neurological states that evolution DID select for carried along with them as a side effect fine-grained, regular, coherent, truth evaluable mentality. Or perhaps that God eliminated individuals that were developing ‘crazy’ mentality. But this is to deny natural selection.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that epiphenomenalism about the mental is way too costly and also pretty incredible. It’s obvious that qualia affect what I do; they are hardly black holes in causal space. So either one must maintain that extra-physical mental states are causally efficacious or one must maintain physicalism is true of the mental. A creationist can do both. So can an anti-creationist.