Why Do Christians Love Atheist Philosopher Thomas Nagel?

The answer to this question lies in the fact that for some unexplained reason they both share an illicit grounding for knowledge. Thomas Nagel is one of the reasons I have very little respect for scientifically uninformed philosophers even if they are atheists. His forthcoming book is titled, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.About this book we read on Amazon:

The modern materialist approach to life has utterly failed to explain such central features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, or value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

To catch a glimpse of his theory of mind this is what we read on his Wikipedia page:

Nagel is not a physicalist because he does not believe that an internal understanding of mental concepts shows them to have the kind of hidden essence that underpins a scientific identity in, say, chemistry. But his skepticism is about current physics: he envisages in his most recent work that people may be close to a scientific breakthrough in identifying an underlying essence that is neither physical (as people currently think of the physical), nor functional, nor mental, but such that it necessitates all three of these ways in which the mind "appears" to us. The difference between the kind of explanation he rejects and those that he accepts depends on his understanding of transparency: from his earliest paper to the most recent Nagel has always insisted that a prior context is required to make identity statements plausible, intelligible and transparent. Link.

Now I don't claim to know all the answers to his questions exactly, but he shares the same illicit footing as Christians do when they argue from ignorance for Intelligent Design, a fallacy in informal logic where ignorance stands for the lack of evidence to the contrary. "We don't know, therefore God did it!" In Nagel's case, "We don't know therefore neither physical, nor functional, nor mental phenomena by themselves can explain the totality of the mind." Perhaps he's speaking too soon, just like believers have done and been wrong throughout the generations? Wouldn't it have been a more reasonable thing to say, when faced with a multitude of prior problems that, "We don't know the answer yet, but let's wait to see what science can do with it?" I think so. You just don't go around betting against science. Why must Nagel claim "the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false"? That's quite a leap of faith don't you think? No wonder Christians love Nagel, just as they did Antony Flew's supposed conversion to a deistic god.

Wikipedia tells us Nagel doesn't think Intelligent Design is an unscientific research program.

He wrote in 2008 that "ID is very different from creation science...Whatever the merits, however, [it] is clearly a scientific disagreement, not a disagreement between science and something else." In 2009, Nagel recommended Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell as one of his "Best Books of the Year" in The Times Literary Supplement. While Nagel did not accept Meyer's conclusions he endorsed his approach to "this fiendishly difficult problem" of the origin of life. Many scientists and philosophers criticized Nagel's views on this matter.

This just goes to show us that as Jascha Heifetz quipped, "No matter what side of an argument you’re on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side." The problem is that Nagel is not on "our" side, the side of science. He shares with believers an illicit footing for knowledge based in ignorance.