Monday, June 27, 2011

Attacking free will

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne is on the warpath against religion and free will with There’s no free will:
I’ve done quite a bit of reading about free will in the past few months, ... If “free will” is to mean anything, it must mean what Sam insists it does: the notion that we could have done or thought something other than we did. There is not the slightest evidence for that proposition, and there is plenty of evidence against it, ... There is no free will.
I disagreed with Horgan below, but Coyne attacks Horgan for believing in free will here and here.

There are two arguments against free will. One is that psychologists have done experiments showing that we have some distinctive brain activity about a second in advance of making a simple decision. The idea is that some brain process is forcing the decision on us against our conscious wishes, I guess. The second argument is that evolution proved that we are all soul-less automatons who are no better than the worms we descended from. Neither argument is convincing to me. Coyne brags about how scientific his thinking is, but it does not seem scientific to me.

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