I recently came across an article in Phys.org on a new book by Dr. Robert Sapolsky. You can read this article here.
In the article, Dr. Sapolsky says that “We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there.”
The rationale for his conclusion is a very old one. Basically, if free will does exist, how can it exist? After all, if our brains are made of molecules and atoms, all of which obey the laws of physics with no exceptions, then free will would, in effect, involve violating (or at least circumstantially modifying) the laws of nature. If those laws are absolute, then no free will is possible.
Dr. Sapolsky did not invent this point of view. Pierre-Simon Laplace enunciated it back in the early 1800’s, in an argument sometimes called Laplace’s Demon. What Dr. Sapolsky is saying is that science essentially upholds this position. “All we are is the history of our biology, over which we had no control,” he says in the beginning of chapter 4.
I very much appreciate Dr. Sapolsky’s presentation of the issue, because I think he is right when it comes to evaluation of the physical world. The laws of nature, on their own, do not permit free will to exist.
What this means, though, is that if free will does in fact exist, it requires something that sits outside of the laws of nature.
When I was in university and in my early secular career, I went through a crisis of faith. As I reflected on the issues involved, my first question was this: is there any evidence that there is anything other than matter? The most obvious answer I could find was free will. If free will exists, then there must be something outside of matter that allows for it to be a possibility.
Dr. Sapolsky can make the argument that free will cannot exist within the laws of nature. On that, he and I can agree. What he cannot rule out is whether or not something beyond nature exists, because such a conclusion goes beyond the scientific method.
In other words, it takes faith. Not faith in God, but a more basic faith in reason and in experience.
The issue comes down to this: do we have free will? Dr. Sapolsky is not really arguing that we don’t, but that we can’t. He is ruling it out based in part on his method. But if free will does, in fact, actually exist, then it shows something goes beyond his method.
For myself as a young man, I realised that denying the existence of free will was to deny my own experience of it. In fact, it was about denying the existence of millennia of human experience that is rooted in the notion that it exists. And it involved believing that a determined universe could somehow created a situation in which determined beings could come to the erroneous conclusion that they were in fact free.
All of that seemed unreasonable to me. I couldn’t prove free will existed, of course, but very few things outside of mathematics can have absolute proof. Even science depends on inductive reasoning, which always admits the possibility, however remote, of falsifiability.
So that left me with faith. Not faith in God, but faith in free will itself. Faith in my experience of free will, and in the experience of people and cultures throughout the ages.
A faith that is, quite frankly, the most reasonable conclusion of common human experience. If literally billions of people have shared a common experience, building whole bodies of art and culture and law around that common experience, then it is likely that experience is real.
And the conclusion that arose from that faith in experience is that something must exists which goes beyond nature. Call it God, call it angels, call it the human soul - at that point in my crisis of faith I wasn’t ready to conclude which - but there had to be *something*.
If there is only the material universe with absolute natural laws, then there is no free will. If there is free will, then there can’t just be a material universe with absolute natural laws. And if the laws are indeed absolute, it means there is more than just the material universe.
Welcome to the spiritual.
If we don't have free will, then we can't be blamed for anything. The devil didn't make me do it, it was those molecules.
I'll stick with free will, thanks.
Living requires a great deal of faith. I have faith in so many things, because I know, with absolute certainty, little more than my own experience. Will the sun rise tomorrow? I believe it will. Do I have free will, I believe I do.