Free Christian Illusions

On Neuroscience, Free Will, and Morality

Fifteen years ago, when I was traveling to a conference in Seattle, I read an article by Tom Wolfe which caused me to begin thinking seriously about matters of neuroscience, free will, and morality. Wolfe wrote about brain imaging and what he called “the hottest field in the academic world, neuroscience.”

According to Wolfe:

Neuroscientists … will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self–consciousness (Cogito ergo sum) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What “ghost,” what “mind,” what “self,” what “soul,” what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being’s life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth century.

This sudden switch from a belief in Nurture, in the form of social conditioning, to Nature, in the form of genetics and brain physiology, was according to Wolfe the “great intellectual event, to borrow Nietzsche’s term, of the late twentieth century.” He added, “Thereupon, in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: ‘The self is dead’—except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: ‘The soul is dead.’ He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: ‘The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists.’”

Which brings us to the here and now. , excerpts from which appear on his blog. Two recent entries [ here and here ] put forward these propositions: (a) brain science has spoken and the conclusion is inescapable: the concept of free will is a myth; and (b) this understanding, while it might alter our view of morality in some respects, doesn’t destroy the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil. We can have morality without free will.

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