A Neurosurgeon’s Response to Atheists Who Deny We Humans Have Free Will
Which way will you choose? Or has your choice already been made for you? Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash
Dr. Michael Egnor is a neurosurgeon and Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook. He’s also a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Egnor says the fact human beings have free will is self-evident.
Dr. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist, and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci deny that you and I are able to make our own choices. But Coyne and Pigliucci go after each other because each claims the other opposes free will for the wrong reasons.
So Egnor addresses both of them in the latest edition of Discovery’s Mind Matters and in the process provides an excellent dissection of the secular materialist arguments that human beings are nothing more than bags of molecules in motion.
Here’s Egnor’s opening graphs:
“Of all of the materialist cults, free will denial may be the most bizarre. Nothing could be more obvious in everyday life that in a very real sense we generally have the option to choose our acts. We choose mundane things like what to have for breakfast and what clothing to wear and we make moral choices every day.
“The denial that we have the freedom to choose is essentially the assertion that we are robots, enslaved to our physics and chemistry and incapable of freedom. Obviously this view of humanity is deeply insulting – it’s just a slur – but is also rank nonsense. In fact, it’s self refuting and obviously so.”
Go here for the rest of Egnor’s response.