| Question of the Week: Does Neurophysiology Prove That Humans Have No Free Will? |
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"I have a question about free-will. An atheist objected that we don't have free will because neurology has demonstrated that specific neurons fire before we are under the impression that we are making a free choice. Do you know where he is going with this, and what a response to this would be?" The objection here is a double-edged sword and need not entail that free will does not exist. The other end of the blade is that the notion of determinism is not true. In other words, the argument given here does not warrant the conclusion that free will does not exist. Rather, what this suggests, given the apparent intuition that free will is an authentic property of human free creatures, is that the mind is not merely a set of specific neurons firing in the brain. Indeed, many Christian dualists use the reality of free will in their apologetic to show why there must be something beyond the mere physical. Secular philosophers who oppose determinism go on to show how moral culpability, value, and ethics are all meaningless if determinism is true. But precisely how should we respond to this atheist friend of yours? I think I would emphasize what I started out by saying - that all we know from neurophysiology is that there is a close correspondence between the choices we make and certain neurons in the brain. Even one of the greatest materialists defending reductionism over dualism admits that dualism can possibly account for this correspondence (see Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective, p. 72). What the materialist would have to show is that only neurons are in play and there is nothing else contributing to the decision-making in human creatures. This, of course, is quite the tall order! You could also deflect this attack if you are addressing other, more pressing issues by noting that some Christians are in fact materialists too (think of Lynne Rudder Baker and Peter van Inwagen). As Professor John Hick has rightly pointed out in his small Philosophy of Religion text, the Christian hope is ultimately not to be disembodied but to be resurrected in physical form. Belief in an intermediate state of disembodiment is an optional component to Christian theology - for better or worse. |
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