If free will was truly free then we would all have it. However, it appears that Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne have placed such a hefty fee upon will that free will is not free, no one can afford it and we do not have it: free will is not free and thus, it is not will.
One of the latest examples of the deleterious effects of materialistic, mechanistic, reductionist views of held to by some Atheists is the denial of free will. This is not a new concept in the least bit, nor is it exclusive to Atheists. Yet, relatively recent statements in this regard by Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne are illustrative of their particular and peculiar fallacies.
Sam Harris is an activist Atheist and a pseudo-neuroscientist (yes, he has the earned diploma on the wall but no, he is not a true scientist because he admits to coming into the field with a bias that drives his research and clouds his conclusions—see “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief” – Sam Harris’ Neuroscientific Escapades).
Jerry Coyne is an Atheist activist and professor of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago.
Coyne and Harris are essentially paraphrasing each other. Let us begin with Coyne’s article Why you don’t really have free will as a good example of their collective un-chosen views.
The rock band Rush had a song that went:
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
But what does Jerry Coyne have to say about it?:
You may feel like you’ve made choices, but in reality your decision…was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your “will” had no part in that decision.
So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will…
The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they’re finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.
The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons. This is interesting as it is a paraphrase of the statement made as part of the opening statement by an Atheist whom this Examiner debated at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. We debated morality and he stated that he would not deal with the issue as is generally done, with reference to philosophy, but based on neuroscience.
Not surprisingly, he concludes that morality is brain stuff because we can see how segments of the brain light up when we engage in moral considerations. Of course, this is tantamount to concluding that color and shape are merely brain stuff that does not exist out there in the real world because segments of our brains light up when we view color and shape—find the debate video here (the video attached to this article is a sample):
…by “free will.” I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it’s your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation…But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.
By the way yes, according to his very own conclusions Jerry A. Coyne was determined to write what he wrote and so there is no reason to believe any of it as he choicelessly wrote it. His conclusions are not based on scientific research but upon the predetermined firings within his gray matter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby. If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help out. Here is my donate/paypal page.
Due to robo-spaming, I had to close the comment sections. However, you can comment on my Twitter page, on my Facebook page and/or on my Google+ page.
Twitter: #SamHarris, #JerryCoyne, #Atheism
Facebook: #SamHarris, #JerryCoyne, #Atheism