Tag Archives: Free Will

Our Problem: To Explain the Human Condition

Genesis 3 tells how humans first entered into what I’m calling our problem. Some people find the story there hard to believe on account of the talking serpent and the seemingly magical fruit. We’ll come back to that. For now I want to show what it is in Genesis 3 that makes more sense than …

January 31, 2012 – 5:50 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Bible, The Faith, Worldviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (28)

Can Science Disprove Free Will?

Premiss 1. If libertarian free will (LFW) exists, it operates such that natural law does not determine its course or its actions, nor is it a matter of chance. (Definition of libertarian free will) Premiss 2. Science’s competence (meaning the empirical, physical sciences) is strictly in the study of events and entities in conjunction with, …

January 20, 2012 – 6:00 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Origins and Science | Tagged , | Comments (81)

Coyne Responds on Free Will

Jerry Coyne has responded to my piece (and others’) yesterday on his Free Will article in USAToday. He begins, Predictably, at his own website the Thinking Christian says that the assumption of natural laws that absolutely determine our choices is an unjustified a priori conclusion, not supported by science itself. (Nope, it’s a conclusion based …

January 3, 2012 – 11:53 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in New Atheism, Origins and Science | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (18)

Jerry Coyne: “Why you don’t really have free will” – USATODAY.com

Jerry Coyne, who knows a lot about biology, doesn’t know nearly enough about other things on which he claims to be an authority. If what had written were only on his blog I would ignore it, but USAToday published it online: “Why you don’t really have free will.” It includes, Now there’s no way to …

January 2, 2012 – 10:04 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in New Atheism, Origins and Science | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (169)

Pro-Choice Determinists

I was just wondering how many determinists—people who believe that human free will is an illusion, because everything is determined by physical law—would describe themselves as “pro-choice.”

September 26, 2011 – 10:13 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Life and Choices | Tagged , , | Comments (123)

Free Will: Where’s the Real Illusion?

It never ceases to amaze me how some people will blithely burst forth with incoherent convictions of determinism. I acknowledge that Anthony R. Cashmore is an accomplished biologist holding an endowed chair at Penn. But that doesn’t mean he makes sense speaking of free will. The following comes from his January 2010 paper, The Lucretian …

June 26, 2010 – 4:48 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Origins and Science | Tagged , , | Comments (50)

Bering in Mind: Scientists say free will probably doesn’t exist, but urge: “Don’t stop believing!”

From a Scientific American piece on free will: Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth,” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social …

April 8, 2010 – 10:15 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Origins and Science | Tagged , | Comments (19)

The Will to Power–Is “Free Will” All in Your Head?: Scientific American

This from Scientific American raises interesting questions regarding knowledge: The Will to Power–Is “Free Will” All in Your Head? The author, Christof Koch, apparently wants to balance philosophical questions with scientific ones. I appreciate his trying—but he doesn’t succeed. Not even if we ignore the oddly inappropriate allusion to Nietzsche in the title (for which …

November 16, 2009 – 1:32 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Origins and Science | Tagged , , | Comments (160)

Ideas Have Consequences: Free Will vs. The Programmed Brain

Ideas have consequences! One such was recently shown through an experiment described in Scientific American. [R]esearchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected [the philosophical notion of] free will…. The correlation was positive: those who rejected free will tended to cheat more. The 22-page original research paper, …

August 19, 2008 – 10:42 am | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Ethics | Tagged , , | Comments (102)

“Unconscious decisions in the brain”

A new study just reported from Germany concludes that “Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain…. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the …

April 14, 2008 – 1:26 pm | By Tom Gilson | Posted in Origins and Science | Tagged , , | Comments (64)