ID advocate Michael Egnor defends free will, misleads his audience

I don’t usually respond to attacks on me from the Discovery Institute and its flacks, but I couldn’t resist listening to this 25-minute talk on free will from pediatric neurosurgeon and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Egnor, who’s been going after me for years (read the last link to Wikipedia, and his Discovery Institute biography here).

This talk was given “at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith presented by Discovery Institute’s Center on Science & Culture”.  The title of that conference, which featured lots of religionists, was “Endowed By Our Creator: Science,Faith, and the American Idea,” and the conference—and Egnor—made no bones about their a priori belief in God.  And if you believe in God the way these people do, there has to be free will:  otherwise you cannot freely choose to accept God, to behave according to his/her/its dictates, or, if you’re a Catholic like Egnor, choose Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. 

Egnor was once an atheist but then converted to Catholicism in his forties,after he had a “Damascus Road moment” involving hearing a voice.  As Grok says, Egnor “has spoken about falling in love with Catholic theology and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Thomism), which he integrates with his scientific and philosophical views on topics like the mind-body problem, dualism, consciousness, and intelligent design.” He’s abandoned the idea of materialism and, as you’ll see in this video, touts the existence a non-materialistic soul that could only have been created by God (who, by the way, has also gotten credit from Egnor for “creating” the Big Bang).

The talk is briefly summarized by David Klinghoffer, another ID advocated, at the Discovery Institute’s Science & Culture Today site. Click on the screenshot below to read the DI’s idea of humor:

Who are the atheist scientists? N0ne other than your host, Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky (whom Egnor repeatedly misspells and mispronounces as “Saplosky”). You’d think that Egnor could at least get Sapolsky’s name right; it is not a typo. But I am honored to be lumped together with these two smart guys.

And before the video, I want to give an example from Klinghoffer’s piece of Egnor’s quasi-humorous sarcasm, which makes the religious audience roar with laughter:

Regarding Harris, Coyne, Sapolsky and the books they’ve authored, Dr. Egnor says, “The people who deny free will, the authors of these books, if you want to find out out if they believe in morality, and therefore if they believe in free will, all you have to do is tear up their royalty checks from their books. And tell them, ‘Hey, I didn’t have any choice, it’s just an act of nature.’” That’s funny.

He also offers a proposal for a book to be co-authored by the esteemed free will deniers, to be titled, We Can’t Control Our Thoughts and We Don’t Know Where They’re Coming From: Three Scientists Who Didn’t Choose to Write This Book, to be published by The Atheist Press. That made me laugh out loud. Enjoy:

Apparently the idea that we could not do other than what we did is hugely funny to these people: all you have to do is say it and they laugh. But sarcasm is not a determinant of truth.

Well, enough. If you have 25 minutes to listen to a religious argument for free will, with some misguided science thrown in, click below:

I can summarize the talk if you don’t want to listen to it.  Egnor’s point is that there are four (actually five) arguments against free will. I’ll summarize them in bold (my take) and then address them in a few words. Those of you who have read my writings on free will (or Sapolsky’s or Harris’s books) should be able to refute these easily. I conceive of “free will”, as does Egnor, in the libertarian sense: if you have it, at a given moment you could have done or thought something other that what you did.

a.) Every human who has lived, is living, and will live believes in free will.  Most people believe in God, too.

This is simply the argumentum ad populum: something becomes more true if more people believe it.  There is no need to refute this contention; it asserts the truth of a proposition without evidence. However, Egnor goes on to present what he does see as evidence. 

b.) Morality supports free will. “We all believe in some kind of morality.” “If you believe in morality, you have to believe in free will, because without free will there is no morality.”

Nope. I can frame “morality” as simply “the tenets that a society or faith considers laudable or deleterious because they facilitate or impede the smooth running of society”.  Abrogating these tenets is considered bad, and they can be promoted simply by praising those who abide by the tenets or criticizing and punishing those who violate them. There need be no “free will” to have morality, for even though we lack free will, we are still malleable beings and can alter our behavior depending on society’s “moral code” and the praise and punishment that go with it.

c.)  Denial of free will is self-refuting. Here’s Egnor’s trope: “If you deny free will then you can’t choose to tell the truth, so why would you believe somebody when they say they deny free will.”  This is a crazy argument, for the denial of free will is based on evidence—evidence for determinism and the lack of evidence for free will. The data involve a growing body of experiments showing that decisions are made in the brain before we become conscious of them.  Other experiments involve psychological manipulation of people so that they think they have acted freely when they didn’t (brain stimulation), or they think they acted without agency when they actually did (e.g., Ouija boards).

d.) There is room for free will in nature.  As Egnor maintains, there are some “aspects of nature that aren’t completely determined by the state of physics.”  What are they?  Quantum physics, of course, and here Egnor cites entanglement. The problem, which he ignores, is that the purely unpredictable aspects of quantum physics involve things on a micro level (movement of electrons, etc.), and those cannot be affected by your “will”.  But Egnor, citing quantum physics, says it shows that “At any moment there’s room for will.” But since he sees free will as the product of an immaterial soul, he shouldn’t be using any aspect of physics to support it.

e.) Neuroscience points to the reality of free will. Since Egnor is a neuroscientist, the audience probably buys this the most.  Egnor cites two bits of evidence here.  First, as he says, during operations that involve stimulating parts of the brain, he says,  “Patients asked to raise their arms at some point could tell whether they raised arm voluntarily or due to electrical stimulation.”  And they could tell the difference.

But that is not “free will”, for your brain simply lets you know whether something you don’t understand is making you raise your arm, or whether, under orders from the doctor, you have to raise your arm at some point.  It’s similar to Libet’s button-pushing experiments, when you push a button at a time your brain determines, and think you did it of your own “free will.” The problem with that, and the reason Libet and his successors have done such provocative studies, is that brain signals (fMRI, etc.) say you’re about to push a button before you become conscious of making that decision. Like Libet’s experiments, being able to distinguish something that comes from your brain’s own workings from something imposed on your brain from the outside is not “free will”. It is not the exercise of agency, but the detection of agency.

For example, sometimes the brain is stimulated and a patient waves his arm or hand. When asked by the surgeon why the patient did that, he may aver that he was waving at a nurse across the room. Egnor completely ignores the various classes of observations and experiments in which stimulation of the brain produces a false illusion of intention or false agency. These need not involve brain stimulation, but can involve psychologically tricking a subject.

I should add that Benjamin Libet (last name mispronounced by Egnor, who uses a long “i”), who became famous for detecting the signals of action before the subject was aware of “deciding” to act, wound up believing, as Egnor says, in “free won’t.”  That is, though Libet accepted that decisions to do something were made deterministically in the brain, he concluded later that there was “free won’t”: patients could decide freely to cancel an action that they had already decided to do. Libet says that this veto instantiates free will because there is no neurological signal of the veto!  (This is about 14 minutes into the lecture.)

The problem with this—and this must reflect deliberate misrepresentation by Egnor—is that later work involving brain-scanning shows that you can indeed predict whether a patient would veto an action or not from brain activity.  Here’s the paper from PLOS One (brought to my attention by Grok) that showed this (click to read):

You can read the abstract and see that these researchers used electrical signals in the brain to show that decision to veto an action are also decided in advance.  Here is the authors’ summary:

Neuroscience cannot straightforwardly accommodate a concept of “conscious free will”, independent of brain activity [42]. However, the belief that humans have free will is fundamental to human society [43]. This belief has profound top-down effects on cognition [44] and even on brain activity itself [45]. The dualistic view that decisions to inhibit reflect a special “conscious veto” or “free won’t” mechanism [46] is scientifically unwarranted. Instead, conscious decisions to check and delay our actions may themselves be consequences of specific brain mechanisms linked to action preparation and action monitoring [19]. Recent neuroscientific studies have strongly questioned the concept of free will, but have had difficulty addressing the alternative concept of free won’t, largely because of the absence of behavioural markers of inhibition. Our results suggest that an important aspect of “free” decisions to inhibit can be explained without recourse to an endogenous, ”uncaused” process: the cause of our “free decisions” may at least in part, be simply the background stochastic fluctuations of cortical excitability. Our results suggest that free won’t may be no more free than free will.

Unless you think Egnor simply missed a paper that refutes his thesis, because he didn’t have a grasp of the literature, then he must be leaving it out deliberately: a scientific misrepresentation of a field by a neuroscientists who has supposedly studied the data thoroughly. This is why the word “Egnorance” is often used in connection with the man’s writings. But I won’t use it. . .

The rest is religious pilpul: Egnor immediately goes on to cite Aquinas, his hero, and to show this slide:

Where, asks Egnor, does free will come from? God, of course. His lucubrations lead him to conclude that “The Universe is more like a mind than a thing.”  Therefore, he says, there must then be free will involved in the foundation of the universe (“we cannot be free if everything around us is not free”).  After making the Big Bang, he believes, God created us with the ability to freely choose between right and wrong.

But wait! There’s more! He says that our possession of libertarian free will, which he claims to have proven in this lecture, also has implications for our immortality: for what happens to us after death!  His “telling” argument is that since human souls, whatever they may be, are immaterial, and thus cannot “disintegrate like a body does.”   He concludes, to rousing applause, that “Free will is God’s fingerprint in us.”

Here we see that religion, tricked out in the trappings of science, has led Egnor to reject determinism and materialism because they don’t involve his Catholic God. But his arguments can be refuted either with logic or with empirical observations or experiments.  Thus does faith make a hash of rationality.