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Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne on free will, part 2 of 9

We continue considering that Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne deny free will: find the entire series here.

What his article turns out to be is a picture perfect example of the deleterious results of making Darwinism (a theory that is supposed to be about biology) and science in general into worldviews. This restricts the views, the thoughts, the conclusions of those who hold to it by forcing them, as it where, to come to strictly mechanistic, materialistic, reductionists conclusions. As Dr. William B. Provine (Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University) previously noted:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear-and these are basically Darwin’s views.

There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind.
There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me.
There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. Now, back to Jerry Coyne:

…we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe.

Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the “choosing.” And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with…Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.
This is what a mechanistic, materialistic, reductionist view is all about, it “must” must mind you “come down to molecules and physics.” sam20harris2c20atheism2c20true20freethinker-5357584

True “free will,” then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain’s structure and modify how it works. Science hasn’t shown any way we can do this because “we” are simply constructs of our brain.
We can’t impose a nebulous “will” on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program. The following statement is a distilment of large arguments succinctly stated: while we have not evidence that matter brought about mind, we do have evidence that mind brought about matter. For example, all life and actually everything—such as “molecules and physics”—is based on information and the only known source of information is mind. Another thing to consider is that it is at least reasonable to conclude that since time, space and matter came into being then their cause could be said to be timeless or eternal, space-less meaning not subject to locality and immaterial or spirit or mind. A mind is not subject to laws of nature as is the brain thus, we do and can “step outside of our brain’s structure.” For more see:

On God and the creation: how does the immaterial interact with the material?

A. C. Grayling’s gray matter – mind / brain dualism

VIDEO: Atheist and Jewish-Christian discuss: brain, mind, God and morality

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