Biologist Jerry Coyne, who is also an atheist activist, offers another post denying free will. Journalist Oliver Burkeman published an essay at the The Guardian last week, asking, “The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?”, quoting Coyne among others. Coyne, who believes that free will is indeed an illusion, offers support at his blog. Read at your leisure but note: He ignores critical science issues around free will, including the following:

1. Nature is not deterministic. The fact that nature is not predetermined in detail has been shown quite convincingly by the experimental confirmation of Bell’s theorem in quantum mechanics. Succinctly, over the past 50 years, at least 17 teams of researchers have asked and answered the question: Does the state of a system immediately prior to a quantum change determine the state of the system immediately after the quantum change? The clear answer: It does not.

In more technical terms, there are no hidden variables that determine the outcome of quantum waveform collapse. Coyne is undoubtedly aware of this — I have pointed it out to him repeatedly and he has acknowledged it tangentially — but he continues to misrepresent it in his posts on determinism.

Obviously, the fact that nature itself has been shown not to be deterministic is a real problem for denying free will via an appeal to science. Coyne and others like him seem to want to misrepresent the science rather than admit that they are wrong about science-based support for determinism.

More Misrepresentations

2. Neuroscience clearly supports the reality of free will. The research of Benjamin Libet and others unequivocally points to freedom of the will. I discuss that in detail here.

3. The claim that “free will isn’t real because we are governed by states of matter” is self-refuting. Suppose nature were determinist: Then states of matter — particular arrangement of molecules, neurotransmitters, or whatever — would govern our thoughts and actions.

However, that claim (“Free will isn’t real because … ”) is a proposition — a statement that can be either true or false. But states of matter are not propositions. They can be neither true nor false. Then the very proposition, “Free will is an illusion,” is not an argument. It’s just an arrangement of matter that has no truth value. All claims on the subject are meaningless.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.