The Real Issue: Sam Harris' Book on No "Free Will" Will Be Unreasonable Rhetoric

I know I've posted previously about the vacuous logic of those who take the stance that we have no free will, but I just read this post and it bears repeating. It's from Rob Lundberg's blog:

The Real Issue: Sam Harris' Book on No "Free Will" Will Be Unreasonable Rhetoric

Reason Rally: secular "values" and Reason

The "Reason Rally," to take place in Washington, DC on March 24th, is billed as the "largest gathering of the secular movement in world history."  The organizers claim that the rally will "deliver the good news:" that secularism is growing. They go on to state "the event is indeed a celebration of secular values."

Wow.  That's a lot to swallow, considering there are at least three hot-button topics just in that summary: (1) what are secularism's values, (2) is secularism really good news, and (3) does the title "Reason Rally" really apply well to a secularist gathering?

To summarize up front (for those who do not wish to read the long blog post), I contend that (1) secularism has no values (and cannot have values), (2) secularism is, in the long run, really really bad news, and (3) the title "Reason Rally" is actually a misnomer when applied to a secularist gathering; in fact, only in a theistic worldview does reason even make sense.

Before getting into that, though, I would like to point out that there will be a coordinated Christian response at the Reason Rally, and that a book from a Christian perspective, and in direct response to the Reason Rally, will is soon to be published.  (See more details at the website True Reason.)

First, what exactly are secular values, and why should they be celebrated?

I contend that the term "secular values" is actually something of an oxymoron.  If no God exists, and this universe is simply an accident full of only material and material causes, then why would there be immaterial values of any kind?  Furthermore, the most honest atheists, who have actually taken their worldview to its logical conclusion, end up in a very scary place.  Take Princeton Professor Peter Singer's views on abortion and infanticide, for example.  On his secularist view, infanticide is ok, as long as we can justify the fact that the infant has no expressed preference for whether it lives or dies.  As crazy and out there as it seems, this is the logical conclusion of his secularist worldview.

Famous atheist Richard Dawkins mirrors this statement in his book "A Devil's Chaplain," where he explains that the logical conclusion from a naturalistic evolutionary worldview is that humans have no more moral dignity and worth than a chimpanzee (or than any other organism, for that matter).  This is one of the places that I actually applaud Dr Dawkins, for honest reflection and taking his worldview to its logical conclusion.

To be clear, I am definitely not saying that all atheists will live this way.  On the contrary, of course most atheists do not.  But why not?  Because, even though the worldview they have chosen for themselves logically ends in a complete lack of moral values, we humans cannot seem to shake the feeling that such values exist.  So even though cold logic will lead an honest atheist to realize the world and universe have no meaning, and there is no reason to feel like our behavior should be restrained by any sort of moral code, we all know deep down inside that is not true.  Our intuition tells us there must be an objective moral code, even if we wish it not to be the case.

In other words, no atheist actually lives according to his worldview!

This is why you see so many atheists today twisting and turning to justify their worldview in light of its lack of values.  For example, atheist Michael Shermer insists there must be an objective moral code; it just came from evolution.  That way, he can rationalize his atheistic worldview with what he knows to be true: immaterial, objective morality exists. (And by the way, if you dig deep enough into Michael Shermer's view, you do find theistic, transcendent-to-evolution moral language smuggled in.  It's a classic example of an atheist using "borrowed capital" from the Christian worldview in order to get his atheistic worldview make sense.)

On the other hand, I think it's clear that secularism does lead to a degrading of our own personal moral values.  Even though most everyone does strive to be a "good person", if you do not believe anyone or anything is holding you morally accountable, then you can (for convenience, pleasure, financial gain, etc), compromise on what you would originally think is a moral standard.  Pretty soon, after enough compromising (and self-justification), you end up convincing yourself the moral value in question wasn't really part of the moral standard anyway.  I know this from my own life.  I used to be an atheist, and I wasn't a "bad" person back then.  But looking back on it, I can definitely point to a multitude of cases where I hurt others for my own selfish purposes, and I rationalized these instances away for my own self-justification.

For more discussion on this, see my series of posts on Postmodernism, Moral Relativism (here, here, and here), Evolutionary Morals, and Presumptions.

Second, is the fact that secularism is growing actually "good news"?

(And as a side note: did the organizers intentionally use that term, taking a subtle jab at Christianity, given that the word "gospel" literally means "good news?")  As I noted above, secular values, if they are even grounded in anything, actually degenerate into chaos when allowed to take their logical course. Why would the fact that secularism is on the rise actually be good news?

Another way you could ask this is, "What are the consequences of a secular worldview actually dominating society?"  Communist Russia, Hitler's Nazism, and Mao Tse-Tung's regime are all commonly-cited examples of the horrific results of a state-enforced secularism.  I am aware that many atheists will try to twist out of this charge, stating that these regimes did not have atheism as their primary belief system, and that atheism itself is not a belief in something (it is rather a non-belief in something), and thus you can't place the blame on atheism's shoulders. However, it is clear that worldviews have their consequences, and the Reason Rally is a direct (and self-promoted) proof that atheists consider secularism to be a belief system/worldview.

Finally, does secularism really have reason on its side?

While most people's knee-jerk reaction would be, "Of course," if you dig down deeper, you'll find that theism is the only worldview that actually makes rational sense.  Unfortunately, the name "Reason Rally" is a classic example of a loaded term in marketing.  Just by its name, it is implying that only in secularism will you find reason, rationality, and logic.  Why would anyone want to waste their time with religion, which can be characterized as superstition, mythology, and fairy tales?

Clearly, I don't agree with that implied position.  In fact, as I've argued in the past, reason, logic, and the rationality of the universe find a much nicer fit within theism.  To take it one step further, atheism is actually in conflict with rationality, reason, and logic.  Let me provide a brief summary of this for you.

The laws of physics, the laws of logic, and the rationality of the universe are all something that we would expect if the universe were the product of a rational mind (i.e., God).  As far as we can tell, each of these things is an immaterial, transcendent reality, something that makes no sense in a materialistic worldview.  The positive philosophical and scientific evidence for theism is overwhelming, and to deny it is a matter of volition rather than rationality.

Furthermore, the atheistic worldview not only provides a more uncomfortable fit for logic and reason, it actually does violence to our reason.  The secular worldview posits the occurrence of a series of astronomically improbable events to explain the existence of this universe and the fine-tuning necessary for life.  The common explanation for this is that we happen to live in a "very lucky" universe.  But if it is indeed luck, and we explain away every unlikely event (or, to phrase it another way, every event we don't like) as chance, then why in the world would we think any day-to-day events would conform to the common laws of probability?  Why not have extremely unlikely events occurring all the time?  No, the atheist only posits the weird stuff happening when it's convenient.  Furthermore, our own cognitive ability, as the product of blind chance, somehow has rationality and correspondence to reality.  This makes no philosophical sense.

As you can see, secularism definitely has not cornered the market on reason.  On the contrary, only on theism do reason, logic, and rationality exist.  For more on this topic, see my series of posts on logic and theism (here, here, and here) and on our free will decisions (here and here).

On Jerry Coyne's free will stance, part 2

Before I go on, there are two things that I need to clarify from last time.  First, when I said that psychology and neuroscience were soft sciences, I wasn't dissing them.  I was just pointing out that these fields are not very quantitative.  This is not due to any deficiencies of psychologists or neuroscientists, it's just a fact of how complex these sciences are.  They are not as quantitative and well-defined as physics, which is well-described by a set of differential equations, and where the errorbars on measurements are very small, and where the agreement between quantitative measurements and mathematical models is high.  This is unheard of in biology, much less psychology and neuroscience.  So my point was how could any experiment in these fields of science disprove a long-standing law of logic?

Second, I realize now that I made it sound like Dr. Coyne's entire stance on free will is a result of these experiments on psychology and neuroscience.  Upon further reflection, I realize that is not necessarily the case. More likely, Dr. Coyne is simply an atheist, and believes that we do not have anything about us that is immaterial.  That is, we are our bodies, and we have no soul, no spirit, no "mind", etc., and thus have no free will.  According to this worldview, we are determined by our chemistry.  But now that we have these experimental results from psychology and neuroscience that Dr. Coyne is referring to, he believes this worldview has just been validated.  However, like I said before, these experiments are extremely unlikely to have validated a self-contradiction.

Which brings us back to the original question: exactly how is Dr. Coyne's stance on free will self-contradictory?

The short answer is that if no one has free will, then Dr. Coyne did not arrive at his own conclusion based on his choice.  His brain chemistry made him think we have no free will (and also made him an atheist).

The long answer is this.  If we really have no free will, and everything we do is determined by chemistry, then nothing I believe is actually based on fact or reason.  No decision I make, whether it is to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, or to eat a dark chocolate-covered peppermint Jo-Jo tonight for dessert, was based on reflection, careful thought, and reason.  So, this begs the question, did Dr. Coyne arrive at his stance on free will based on scientific evidence and his own reasoning, as he claims?

Ironically, if his worldview is correct, then no, he did not.  His brain chemistry simply dictated it.  In other words, he may be correct, but it's only because of luck.  Or perhaps, as the evolutionary biologist would have it, I just have the genes that make me believe in God, while Dr. Coyne has the genes to make him an atheist (that is of course a gross oversimplification of evolutionism's stance, but it works well enough for our discussion).

Of course, if this is true, that means that Dr. Coyne has zero evidence to back up his claim, even if he is right.  He can try all he wants, but maybe he's actually not being rational about the evidence.  Maybe he just has the brain chemistry that makes him believe that his evidence that we have no free will is rational.

This worldview then leads to a series of complete absurdities.  How can I sit here and try to convince you of anything, when what I am typing doesn't even have any meaning (because I did not arrive at my own thoughts rationally; they just came from physics)?

The big question this always leads us back to is, if belief in God is false, then why do so many people believe in a god of one form or another?  Why do so many people insist we have a spiritual component?  I've written on this before, but it bears repeating because it is so germane to this topic of free will and determinism.  The answer coming from the evolutionism camp is that at some point in the past, believing (falsely) in a god gave us some sort of fitness advantage (perhaps comforting us in our time of need?), and the fact that so many people still do today is simply a holdover from our evolutionary history.

This claim (besides having zero scientific evidence) is self-contradictory in the same way that Dr. Coyne's is.  If sometimes we have false beliefs because of evolution, how can we be sure that any of our beliefs are true? How can we trust any of our reasoning capabilities?  Maybe Dr. Coyne just got the genes that told him to be an atheistic evolutionist?

I propose that both of these (the argument from determinism and the argument from the evolutionary origin of belief in a god) are self-defeaters for naturalism.

On Jerry Coyne's free will stance, part 1

Since Dr. Coyne's article on free will appeared in USA today, I am sure many of people (Christian or otherwise) have written about it.  So naturally, I'll have to throw in my two cents about it.

In this article, Dr. Coyne argues that we do not have free will.  Because we are biological organisms, we are subject to the laws of physics, and thus everything that we do is pre-determined by our molecular make-up and the interactions that we have with the world around us.  We "chose" to eat dessert tonight because of some chemical reaction that occurred in our brain, not because it was really a choice that we made.

Dr. Coyne further grounds his point of view in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, saying that researchers are finding out that "the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us". In other words, every time you make a choice, you just think you're making a choice. It is an illusion.

He goes on to talk about what the philosophical repercussions are for us, once we all realize that we do not have free will.  These repercussions include becoming kinder people, since we now know we cannot judge others (eg, criminals really had no choice but to commit those crimes), abandoning our Christian faith (since we really don't put our faith in Jesus Christ; we just had to do it because of our brain chemistry), and "realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains".

The astute reader will, at this point, realize that Dr. Coyne's stance on free will is entirely self-defeating. Meaning, if his position is correct, then it creates a contradiction within itself.  Or, to put it another way, if Dr. Coyne is right, he's right for the wrong reasons; he's only lucky, and he did not arrive at his conclusion based on his scientific or rational approach.

I promise to defend my statement in a later post, but for now let me just rant.  Dr. Coyne is a respected evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.  He has a very popular blog called "why evolution is true" and is a prominent speaker and writer.  This is evident in the fact that one of his opinion articles can get published in the USA today.  So my two big questions are (1) why does such a brilliant, esteemed person not realize how philosophically bankrupt his position is, and (2) why does the USA today and other media outlets swallow (hook, line, and sinker as it were) the opinion of someone like Dr. Coyne in a field outside of his own expertise just because he is a professor at a prestigious university?

In regards to question 1, I find it very interesting that he even claims to be in touch with philosophy.  In his article, he says:

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.

That just blows my mind.  In essence, he is saying that no matter what debates or critical thinking has happened in the past in philosophy, the incredibly non-quantitative and soft fields of psychology and neuroscience have proven that we don't have free will?  How in the world does a neuroscience experiment prove that logic doesn't work? What I mean is, if the conclusions of the neuroscientists are correct, then they are completely self-contradictory (as I stated above but have not defended; again, please be patient until next time).  Therefore, to adopt the stance that Dr. Coyne is, based on the results of these soft sciences, you must abandon the laws of logic (the very foundations of philosophy and all of reason for that matter)! Very curious indeed.

In regards to question 2, well, I guess this is just another case of what we've been seeing all over the place from the new atheist movement.  Richard Dawkins, with his non-sequitur arguments, Steven Hawking with his grand pronouncements about metaphysics, etc.  It's really difficult to go up against these giants who have very little argument to stand on, but who can completely change the minds of many just based on their credentials alone.  Credentials, I might add, that do not have anything to do with the subject on which they are speaking.  (Yes, I am a hypocrite.  I am not trained in logic or philosophy either.)

But it really just underscores something that has become more and more clear to me as I take a close look at the new atheist movement.  There is absolutely no substance to their arguments.  It is almost all -- to put it less-than-politely -- drivel.  (And by the way, I am not the only one to realize this.  Take a look here.)  Classical philosophers such as Hume and Kant were the real giants in their fields.  If you really want to argue against Christianity, take a look not at the bold pronouncements that biologists make about philosophy and theology, you need to look at the philosophers themselves!  (Again, a hypocrite am I, since I have not bothered to read these either.)

So, in my next post, I do promise to actually defend my take on Dr. Coyne's free will stance.