Atheists believe in Determinism

I try to understand intellectuals who deny free will.

They argue that all of everyone's choices are determined by laws of nature, and yet they often talk about choices they make, and they try to persuade others to make better choices.

Here is a leftist-atheist-evolutionist in his latest of many rants against free will:

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.

How can we alter our behavior if we have no free will? What is the use of praise or punishment, if no one else has free will either?

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”, ...

There is a difference between raising your arm voluntarily, out of your own free will, and being forced to raise it because a brain surgeon triggered a neuron.

He complains that Egnor ignores a 2013 study that concludes:

Neuroscience cannot straightforwardly accommodate a concept of “conscious free will”, independent of brain activity [42].

I accept that free will involves brain activity. I do not accept that there is any law of nature prohibiting free will.

They cite experiments by Libet that supposedly showed that voluntary decisions are preceded by brain activity. This means that a decision takes more than a millisecond, as the brain takes some time to make it. It has nothing to do with free will.

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.

So your brain prepares to push the button before it pushes. It baffles me that anyone thinks this refutes free will.

Responses are posted here and here.

I have never said that people are or should be deemed “morally responsible” for their good and bad acts. That would assume the ability to freely choose to be moral or immoral, but I am a determinist who rejects that kind of “choice.” What I have said, and which anybody who reads what I’ve written will know, is that you should be held responsible for what you do, but not morally responsible.  That is, you are responsible if you are the person who performed the act. That, to anyone with two neurons to rub together, is absolutely compatible with determinism.

So no one can make any moral choices. Curiously, he goes into a big rant against another site for plagiarism. Web content is mostly generated by robots today, and of course the robots are deterministic plagiarizers.

If no one has any free will, then all the humans posting online are just deterministic automatons who are not much different from the robot plagiarizers that he complains about. Including himself.

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.

I wonder if that is the real issue. Catholics and most other Christians believe in free will, and Atheists believe in determinism. Rejecting free will is a way of expressing rejection of Christianity. The other prominent anti-free-will scholars are all strident Atheists. They like to present themselves and logical, scientific, and enlightened, but what they say does not make any sense, is not grounded in science, and is terrible advice on how to live.