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, they cannot “disintegrate like a body does.” Our souls must live forever! 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 with either logic or empirical observations and experiments. Thus does faith make a hash of rationality.
“Endowed By Our Creator: Science, Faith, and the American Idea”
Says it all, doesn’t it.
Woke Right-O-meter reading : very high
You and your buddy are discussing what to have for dinner later. God materializes next to both of you.
God says, “I’m not sure what the problem is here, I know exactly what each of you are going to have for dinner.”
You and your buddy: “That’s impossible, we haven’t decided yet.”
God: “4 billion years ago, I was bored so I wrote down exactly what you two would have for dinner at this point in time. Remember guys, I am all-knowing. I know the position of every atom, past, present and future. How can I be wrong? Look, seal my prediction in this envelop, and open after you order.”
You whisper to your buddy, “I’m going to order clams. I hate clams, I never eat clams. There is no way he’s going to predict that.”
After you order, you open the envelope and look at the paper. It says “You ordered clams. Love, God.”
God then reappears. “You see guys, the whole point of me being all-knowing and perfect is that I am never, ever wrong. But don’t get confused, it is not that I caused you to order clams 4 billion years ago by writing down your order on a piece of paper.
Rather, it is that IN ORDER for me to be able to know everything, including predicting the future, I had to create a deterministic Universe. And since the Universe is deterministic, as complex as it is, past states of the Universe will tell me exactly what will happen in future states. So, you could not have done anything other than what you did when you tried to fake me out by ordering clams.”
You and your buddy, “So does that mean we have no free will?!”
God: “Pretty much. Again, if that wasn’t the case, if the future was actually not yet known to me 100%, then I wouldn’t be all-knowing! People don’t seem to get that, do they? Oh, and I did you a solid by performing a miracle to halt the spread of the e-coli in your body…those clams were nasty. Bye for now!”
Just to add that indeterminism would not help God. To be omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent he would be unconstrained by time, and so see all of the future, including any random uncaused events.
John Calvin’s predestination (God makes people that he knows are destined for hell) is the only coherent theology.
Actually, scrub that, that’s incompatible with benevolence.
Yes, I remember learning about Calvinism as teenager, thinking that it sounded insane. But then it clicked…he was making perfectly logical extensions of these concepts of omniscience and omnipotence…obviously if you asked God at any point “Who is going to Hell?”, he would know with 100% accuracy.
In essence, to a being like God, everything has already happened.
Came to offer a shorter version of Jeff’s more entertaining take. You aren’t free to do other than what god already knows you will do.
” 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.” Important?
Rejection of free will seems to lead to the deterministic implications of Jeff’s story. This makes us nervous because this very 19th century deterministic attitude (i.e., “historical materialism”) led to disagreeable consequences in the 20th century. Maybe we can escape the determinist ( = predictable) implications via the importance of “background stochastic fluctuation”. Is there a “free fluctuationist” school of thought? This would allow some mental processes to be not free, exactly, but unpredictable—the way I do
choose dinner, sometimes.
Well, of course, this whole “free will”-concept is pretty incoherent.
I mean, why do the free-willers believe that humans have “free will” in the first place?
And is it an either-or thing or a matter of degree, i.e. do humans have free will from birth or does it suddenly kick in at some point during childhood? Or is it slowly developing over time, becoming freer and freer (which means that there must have been a human with the freest will ever)?
However, if human toddlers and even babies have free will, then why not adult apes or other intelligent species?
So do you have free will in heaven? If so, can you choose to do evil in heaven and get kicked out? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard religious folk discuss the prospect of making it to heaven and then later getting kicked out.
Didn’t Satan get kicked out — for, err, exercising his free will by rebelling?
Satan = Lucifer = Light bearer. The light of knowing and rebelling. And if I had free will, I wouldn’t believe in him.
Yes, Satan/Lucifer rebelled against god and was “cast out”. But he was an angel. I’m wondering if mere mortals can also screw up and get kicked out. It seems like most religionists think they’re home-free once they get to heaven. I don’t think they ever contemplate the possibility of screwing up and being kicked out.
“We all believe in some kind of morality.”
No, not everybody. I’d argue that most career criminals do not consider societies moralities. And then if there are many kinds of moralities (true by observation) then it is difficult to couple morality to a particular god.
I suspect they have some kind of personal morality that they hold their friends and relatives to.
“Honour among thieves”
“We Can’t Control Our Thoughts and We Don’t Know Where They’re Coming From”
This is a pretty accurate description of how I solve crossword puzzles. The more I do it, the more I notice answers to the clues coming out of nowhere. Of course this way of thinking can’t just apply to crossword puzzles, it must apply to thinking in general. He meant it to be funny, but it’s actually real.
I came upon WEIT about four years ago (my best internet find ever) and if I recall correctly the first WEIT article I read was about an article by Michael Egnor. In the Egnor article he tries to prove the existence of god by showing that a regression of the logic of existence must either end at an uncaused given or it must regress infinitely and so also be uncaused. I agree with this. But then he lost the plot and said “I call this God”. Taken literally that could simply mean that the word “god” is just a synonym for the “universe”. But no one uses the word god that way. There is always an implication of a god/universe duality. I believe that is a direct projection of how we experience ourselves with a mind/brain duality. I believe if one sees why the mind/brain duality is not just materially impossible but also logically incoherent then one will see the same is true of a god/universe duality.
Most people recognize that decisions are logical processes and it’s not hard to see that logical processes are deterministic. But we feel that we can freely choose the information that matters to us and freely weight its significance. This feeling is a duality. We feel that we stand outside not just matter but of information and logic. Coherent action comes from information changing states in consistent ways over time. If we were to take up position outside of information and logic we would have nothing upon which to form an action.
We do not use information and logic to make decisions. We ARE information and logic resolving into decisions. Our brain embodies information and logic. As does our bodies and our environment. The logic of all three resolves together as a single logical process. All are materially separate but logically inseparable.
People who have brain injuries that render them incapable of emotion, so have only logic and information available for decision making, become virtually incapable of deciding anything (such as the time and date of their next medical appointment).
Also, there is nothing resembling logic or application of information when an addict engages in behavior he/she knows will have a bad outcome.
(I worked with a pediatric endocrinologist a few years ago who, despite rehab and a couple of leaves of absence for treatment, could not stop smoking marijuana next to the hospital and so got caught, again, and got fired)
So the description of humans being information and logic resolving into decisions needs to account for the above two pieces of information (at a minimum).
I think you are confusing logic with rationality and information with conscious awareness of information. We are only consciously aware of a tiny part of the information and logic that drives our actions. An addict engaged in harmful behavior is not acting rationally but the action is entirely logical.
If the bible is the best book in the world, and its existence is necessary for a human to find God and salvation, then the book just had to be written by meat robots with no choice in the matter. Would the Book of Daniel carry as much weight if Daniel said “fuck this shit” and left it to his brother George to write the Book of George? Would the bible still have it’s gravitas (to some)?
And how do you choose not to have your very next thought?
I don’t buy the premises of the “free will vs. determinism” debate. Of course it is true that once a specific decision and its outcome have happened, it could not have happened differently – we can’t travel back in time – but we CAN observe relationships between our decisions and outcomes and then decide to make a different choice the next time we find ourselves in a similar situation. Brains are decision-making organs, and our sense of free will must be the subjective experience of our brains – i.e., US – making decisions freely without external constraints or induced dysfunction. The findings of Libet-type experiments are trivial – there is always some antecedent brain activity prior to a conscious percept of anything, including the percept of making a choice; such activity has to be strong enough to spread across multiple brain networks to become a conscious percept. And the fact that under some circumstances (e.g., brain stimulation, split brain syndrome) people can make misattributions regarding the cause of their behavior is no more surprising than other perceptual illusions (of which there are countless examples).
A person can lose their free will, as in cases of severe prefrontal cortical damage leading to environmental dependency syndrome where the person behaves like an automaton, responding stereotypically to external stimuli. There is a difference between a person with EDS and a normal person, and that difference is what the neurologist Lhermitte referred to as “autonomy” in his seminal papers on EDS. Whether an individual decision might reflect a chain of causation going all the way back to the Big Bang is moot as far as I’m concerned.
I agree with the point made by others here that human free will is incompatible with an omniscient God who created everything while knowing exactly how everything will play out in time. That just doesn’t work.
You seem to simply assume that there’s free will and say “we can make a different choice next time.” You surely realize that making a different choice next time is NOT libertarian free will: it’s a different choice because the circumstance (and your brain) are different.
If you think there is libertarian free will, you must think that there is a nonmaterial way to affect your behavior at a given oment. Please tell us what that is. It has to be something beyond the material reality of our brain and its neurons, something metaphysical.
To clarify: I never said I supported the concept of “libertarian free will” as you described it. That is, the idea that once you’ve made a decision you “could have” chosen differently in some abstract sense. As TS Elliot said, “what could have been is just an abstraction.” But once you’ve made a decision and observed the outcome, you might choose differently next time. That choice is not possible for those who suffer EDS.
So given the evidence from neurological cases as I described, I see a case for autonomy/free will for practical purposes. That does not negate the possibility that everything was predetermined by chains of causality extending back to the Big Bang, it just means that perspective has no practical significance. I guess that makes me a compatibilist in some sense.
I think this discussion hinges on different conceptions of what constitutes “the deciding system.” I think the compatibilist view looks only at a small part of the overall system, at a certain level of complexity. I find such an approach unsatisfying. For me the deciding system is everything that needs to be taken into account in order to fully predict its future behaviour as it concerns the decision in question. If one defines the deciding system as this body only, then of course its behaviour cannot be predicted. It’s at the same time too random and too incomplete. But it’s an apples-vs-oranges discussion: we have the free will “in this sense” but not “in that sense” and which scope we prefer determines which answer we get.
I don’t understand this comment. It’s clear that when a human does something, the person’s genes, body, and environment are the “deciding factors”, and I think Egnor and I agree on that.
And prediction has nothing to do with free will. The question is whether someone could have done something other than what they did.
For example, let’s say there is a rickety mechanical robot. It’s so rickety that its behaviour is unpredictable. Yet at the molecular level the robot is deterministic. If our analysis is complete, we can predict its every move. That’s the meaning of my comment.
As I said, even if we lack information for perfect prediction, that has nothing to do with free will. That is the meaning of MY comment.
In response to this post Jerry says: “The question is whether someone could have done something other than what they did.”
The question, of course, is that if the conditions were the same could one act differently. Not to put words in Jerry’s mouth but it seems to me that he has answered this question many times. And his answer is always no. And I agree with this 100%. So the next question I ask is why is it so hard for people to see this. And the answer that I come up with is that people don’t see themselves as part of the conditions. They see themselves as agents acting on the conditions from a position outside of the conditions. This is a duality that cannot happen. The moment you interact with the conditions you become part of the conditions. So resetting the conditions includes resetting the “agent” that fallaciously feels itself to be independent of the conditions. And when that happens there is no coherent way for the results to be any different.
“In what I think is one of the great modern advances in physics, John Stewart Bell, who was a physicist in Ireland in the mid 1960s, published a paper in which he figured out a way to scientifically test the question is nature frozen in that is is determinism true or are there aspects of nature that are not completely determined by the state of physics? And in 2022 the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, who followed on Bell’s theory, did the experiments that Bell recommended and actually answered the question decisively. Is nature determined? We can’t go into the details of their physics, but Einstein was wrong. God does play dice. Meaning there is room in nature and it’s been widely accepted now by the physics community the term they use there is no local determinism.” – Michael Egnor (quoted from the transcript of his speech)
Note the adjective “local”! Yes, Bell did prove with his famous theorem that you cannot have both locality and determinism. However, his theorem does not entail that you cannot have determinism anymore in modern physics. That is, he didn’t disprove determinism as such—neither did Aspect, Clauser & Zeilinger—; and, actually, Bell himself favored Bohmian Mechanics, which is an empirically adequate deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. The bottom line is that the incompatibility of determinism and locality doesn’t mean the falsity of determinism, since one can still consistently maintain it by acknowledging non-locality. A non-local physical universe does not rule out determinism.
Bell’s Theorem: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/
Bohmian Mechanics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/
I assume that Ed Feser and his followers are banned from this site.
It would indeed interest me to know if this is the case or not.
The working definition of “free will” is the power to make choices uninfluenced by natural causes. Yet Egnor & Co. seem to conflate that definition with the ability to choose, a natural faculty of both humans and many other living things. To recognize the ability to choose is based on natural processes in no way disproves that ability.