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Does neuroscience, or any science, pose a challenge to believing human beings have free will? Trent Horn joins us for a discussion of today’s fashionable denial of the fact of free will.
Cy Kellett:
Is free will unscientific? Trent Horn is next. Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Our good friend and colleague, Trent Horn, is in town for a couple of days. So we decided, let’s get him in here and do a couple of Focus episodes with him. Or did we decide that? Maybe the fact that we had him in here is just a consequence of all the things that came before, our molecules and our atoms, they lined up in a certain way, energy discharged, all that happened, and it just happened. Maybe we thought we decided it, maybe it felt like we decided it. But in fact, we do not have free will. We just did what comes to us because of what had come before. And it all added up to, we had Trent in the studio.
That’s what we’re going to talk about with Trent today. Does science disprove our free will, especially neuroscience? A lot of people claiming neuroscience makes clear we don’t have any free choices. Here’s what Trent had to say about that. Trent Horn, Catholic Answers apologist, author extraordinaire. Look at the stack of your books. Thanks for being with us.
Trent Horn:
Thank you for having me, Cy. And look, there’s another little stack here. Look at that.
Cy Kellett:
That’s my stack of Catholic Answers books, and this is your stack of Catholic Answers books.
Trent Horn:
Everybody has to start somewhere, [crosstalk 00:01:27].
Cy Kellett:
It looks like your stack needs to pick my stack up, and take it for its nap.
Trent Horn:
Right? Come here, little buddy. You have a new book.
Cy Kellett:
Come here, little stack of books. It’s a nice, little book. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
It is a nice, little book. It’s a book on a teacher of stranger things.
Cy Kellett:
Not a teacher of stranger things. I know I’m going to get a lot of that. A teacher of strange things, who Jesus was, what he taught, and why people still follow him. But that’s not what we’re discussing. By the way, available now at shop.catholic.com. But that’s not what we’re discussing, Trent.
Trent Horn:
It isn’t What we’re discussing.
Cy Kellett:
Atheists, they keep picking on my free will, and I had to make a conscious choice to be charitable so that I feel proves that I have free will. But what’s up with atheist hating free will so much?
Trent Horn:
Well, I don’t know if atheists would hate free will, but many of them, I’d say almost all of them. But along with even other people as well, in the modern age, seem to have serious objections to, or outright denials of free will. And it’s funny because if you throw out free will, it’s like you and I can’t criticize each other. If I make fun of your book, you make fun of my books, everything has to be the way it is.
Cy Kellett:
It’s just math. It’s just math working its way out.
Trent Horn:
Chemistry and physics. But no, I mean, this is a subject that people have thought about, philosophers have discussed for centuries, really since the beginning of philosophy. Do we have control over our lives? Do we have a freedom to choose, a freedom to will certain outcomes, or have our decisions been determined by something else? So in this case, I think many atheists are antagonistic towards free will, or many of them would say, “Well, I don’t see how there could be any framework for free will because,” they embrace naturalism. They embrace the view that the physical universe is all there is. Maybe there are some non-physical things that exist. Maybe minds exist, maybe there’s some non-physical things, because there’re some atheists who are just straight up materialists.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And they’re going to be pretty opposed to free will because a materialist would say, “Look, all that exists are atoms, electrons, physical things. They are governed by the laws of nature, governed by physical laws. So it’s like a great big clockwork. And the makeup of the universe, its physical makeup determines what events will happen in the future.” So from there, they would say, “Okay, if everything’s just material, then you and I can’t will it to be any different, just like the snowball rolling down the mountain cannot will the avalanche. It could cause the avalanche to act in different ways.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
“But it can’t will it.” This idea goes back a long way. You go to the first century, Roman philosopher, Cicero, the statesman, philosopher, Cicero, this is what he writes. He says, “Besides, since everything happens by fate as will be shown elsewhere, if there could be any mortal who could observe with his mind, the interconnection of all causes, nothing indeed would escape him, for he who knows the causes of things that are to be necessarily, knows all the things that are going to be.” And then Cistero goes on to say, “Only God could know this. So human beings, we just have to resign ourselves to this fact and resign ourselves the idea that the passage of time is like the unwinding of a rope, producing nothing new but unfolding what was there first.
Cy Kellett:
First of all, Cicero, I mean, this is wonderful stuff from him. Even, say a Catholic such as ourselves, would not say he’s entirely wrong about this. I mean, I don’t know if there’s any extraterrestrial, intelligent life. I have no idea, but let’s say there’s not. Well, then what Cicero said is true, virtually everywhere in the universe. It’s just here that it’s not true.
Trent Horn:
Right. And this idea about determinism gained a lot of steam in the enlightenment, when you had the discoveries that people like Isaac Newton, for example, and laws of motion, laws of thermodynamics, seeing that the world is governed by these laws of nature and these relationships between matter and energy. Then the idea is that, okay, we can now, as science progresses … This is something that people had an understanding of for a long time, but then when you have the scientific equation so that when you create a cannon for projectile, and if you’re … I mean, Chris Check, president of Catholic Answers, when he was in the Marines, doing artillery, you have little field manuals with formulas.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And if you just aim everything just right, you can know exactly where the bomb is going to go off. You factor in wind, temperature, angle aim. So you just start to extrapolate from that to say, “Well, if we know where everything, every atom in the universe is, then we’ll know everything that will happen.” And you’re right. In many cases for inanimate objects, we can predict these things, at least for what are called Newtonian or macroscopic objects, things that are big. Because the problem is, people are like, “Oh, yeah.” You go to Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 18th century, he talks about this. He describes the universe as being almost like clockwork.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
This giant erector set, and you could predict everything. But then scientists hit a snag with that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the rise of quantum theory.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Trent Horn:
Because the problem is with quantum physics, it’s like, oh, we have the particle that decays from the atom. We can’t predict that. Even if we know everything about the atoms and the electrons, we can’t predict what state they’re going to be in.
Cy Kellett:
Even physical processes, then. You wouldn’t say what Cicero said about them, that if I knew every detail of the current state of things, I would know what’s going to happen in a minute. And then I could know in 100 years.
Trent Horn:
That’s what scientists thought with the rise of Newton.
Cy Kellett:
But you can’t do that.
Trent Horn:
At least, they would say you couldn’t universally know that when it comes to quantum events.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Because there’s a particular kind of randomness, or the causes in quantum events are probabilistic more than classical. So you take objects like my book, if I drop it, it’s always going to be the case. It’s going to fall. It’s going to accelerate. We can predict its speed. We can do that with large sized objects. And it always happens, unless another force intervenes. But what I would say, with the quantum world, is that the cause and effect there is more probabilistic. It’s like, oh, well there is a cause, but it doesn’t always manifest itself 100% of the time. But the nucleus causes the electron or the protons to decay, to be admitted, but maybe 80% of the time. So you don’t have that. But even still, atheists can say, “Okay, quantum world, we’ll set that aside. That’s weird and odd.”
Cy Kellett:
We’ll get to that when we understand it better, probably..
Trent Horn:
Right. But when it comes to human beings, even if there are quantum processes in our brain, that result in our behaviors, we can’t control them.
Cy Kellett:
I see. Okay. That’s a pretty good argument.
Trent Horn:
The problem is, some people may think, oh, well, I can deal with these objections. The Newtonian determinism that, oh, the whole universe is in a little erector set and I can figure it out because hey, we got quantum mechanics. That doesn’t really help free will because quantum mechanics is random. And we believe that our wills are very intentional, that we, as a subject or an agent, we choose to do certain things. So philosophy, you look at it for thousands of years. And the question about free will and determinism relates to these big subjects. So what does it mean to have free will? Is one.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. That’s right.
Trent Horn:
And number two would be, is free will compatible with determinism? Determinism would be the idea that what happens now is caused or determined by previous states. So the previous, you trace it all the way back to the big bang. Everything that happens now is just because of physical causes in the past.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
That would be determinism. Some people will think, Cy, oh, do we have free will or do we not? Is that the debate? We have free will or we don’t have free will.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, I’d say that’s the intuitive position, but it may be subtler than that.
Trent Horn:
It’s a bit subtler than that. Rather, the debate is whether determinism is compatible with free will.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Trent Horn:
Here’s the thing. There’s two camps here. There would be those who would say they are not compatible. So if the world is determined, you don’t have free will.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
Let’s shrink the world to human beings. If my actions are all determined by things outside of me, if the reason I’m doing everything I’m doing right now is only because of events that happened going back to the big bang, we would say, I’m determined. So then the question is, can I be free if I am determined? If you say no-
Cy Kellett:
You’re a determinist.
Trent Horn:
No. If you say no, you’re an incompatiblist.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, got you. Okay.
Trent Horn:
You would say, “If I am determined, I am not free.” But I bet that’s a position you would have. If the reason I do things is only because of physical causes outside of me, I’m determined. And if that’s the case, I would agree. I would say I’m not free.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Especially if you add this caveat, I could not have done otherwise.
Cy Kellett:
Got you. Okay. ONe excludes the other. Those are incompatible.
Trent Horn:
Right. Then there’s two branches of incompatiblism.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Okay. We see determinism. You can’t have determinism and free will, if you’re an incompatibilist. You have to get rid of one or the other.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
So if you believe you have free will, you’re called a libertarian. But it’s not political libertarian.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
In philosophy-
Cy Kellett:
But you’re at liberty to do what you want.
Trent Horn:
You have liberty, you have freedom. You can choose. So an incompatibilist, who believes in free will, is going to jettison determinism. They’re going to say, “No, no, no. Human beings are not determined solely by physical causes outside of them.” Other libertarians will say, “Not only that, but we could have done otherwise. I could’ve decided to be a little bit late and go to bathroom before this. Okay. I don’t need to go to the bathroom. I’m just saying I could’ve done other things. I could’ve acted otherwise.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
That’s the libertarians. The hard determinist, this would be somebody like Sam Harris in his book, Free Will.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
He would say, “You’re right. Free will and determinism are not compatible. Get rid of free will.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, you don’t have it.
Trent Horn:
He would say, “Free will is an illusion. We don’t have free will. You are no more free than a lightning bolt or a tiger that leaps after its prey. You’re-
Cy Kellett:
And I would say to him, “I don’t choose to believe that.” And he would say, “No, you don’t.”
Trent Horn:
You don’t choose to believe it. You don’t choose-
Cy Kellett:
You don’t choose to not believe.
Trent Horn:
And to say, well, no, we are determined and we don’t have free will, has wide ranging consequences. The biggest one being related to moral responsibility, because it seems pretty intuitive that if you are determined and you don’t have free will, how could you be morally responsible for your actions?
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Right.
Trent Horn:
Or that our responsibility for actions would have to be on par with, take a lightning bolt. So what Harris ends up having to argue in his book on free will is, we are responsible for our acts, but only in a causal sense. I would ask you this, if a cabin burns down because it was struck by lightning, is the lightning bolt responsible for the cabin burning down?
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I see. So certainly in a moral sense, it is not, because it has no moral capacity.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
But in the physical sense, yes.
Trent Horn:
The physical sense, yes.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
He would argue, we could still have prisons and punishment for people who do bad things. Well, he would say this, “We would lock up lightning bolts and earthquakes if we could.” Normally, punishment is related to moral responsibility. We punish people because they’ve done wrong. But Harris would say, “Well, maybe not. Maybe we could just punish people for the good of society.”
Cy Kellett:
That doesn’t seem right. But would he say, we can choose to do that or he would say-
Trent Horn:
He would say we are just following. If we decide to do it, we’ve been-
Cy Kellett:
Why write a book about this, if you can’t choose to do it?
Trent Horn:
Because he wanted to, and he did. And he had to.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I guess so. All of this is determined. You don’t have two choices as a society.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
Not having choice, it makes it … Why are you trying to convince me if anything? Because either I am going to be convinced and that was predetermined, or I’m not going to be convinced, and that was predetermined. So why are you trying to convince me of that?
Trent Horn:
I would say that the denial of free will does lead to a kind of nihilism. In fact, scientists have shown in studies that when people read articles saying that they don’t have free will, they’re more likely to cheat at games and studies. There is one, actually, where the participants in a study read an article saying they don’t have free will. And in the next exercise where they’re giving spicy food to people who can’t handle spicy food, they give them more of it.
Cy Kellett:
That’s a …
Trent Horn:
There’s even a researcher in Israel, who has said, “Look, we don’t have free will, but we can’t let people find out they don’t have will.”
Cy Kellett:
But if we don’t have free will, it doesn’t matter if they find out. Right? And you can’t stop it anyways, you have no choice.
Trent Horn:
This is the incompatibilist. Now they’re actually in the minority side, which would be-
Cy Kellett:
I can see why.
Trent Horn:
Well, on both sides. You and I are incompatibilist because we think, if you’re determined, you’re not free. So guess what? You’re not determined. We’re incompatibilits for libertarian freedom. Harris would be someone who’d say, “Right. If you’re determined, you’re not free. So you’re not free.” The majority of philosophers embrace a view called compatiblism.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
And what they’ll say is, “No, you can be free if you’re determined, because being free only means you do what you want to do.” So if I dragged you into the kitchen, to drink coffee, and you’re like, “I hate coffee. I don’t want to do this,” you’re not free. But if you go in the kitchen, you drink the coffee and you like it, and you wanted to do it, the compatibilist would say that you’re free because you do what you want to do. So at first, oh, that sounds like a nice way to tie up the bow. But incompatibilist, and this is where I and Sam Harris would agree, ironically enough.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, sure.
Trent Horn:
Even though he’s an atheist, both of us would say, “That’s not free will.” We would say no. Harris has an interesting analogy he makes. Sam Harris is one of the new atheists, the four horseman. Daniel Dennett is the forgotten fourth horseman. You’ve got Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett. Dennett’s like, “Remember me? I’m-
Cy Kellett:
Dennett’s a terrible writer, that’s why.
Trent Horn:
Well, he’s a philosopher. He’s not Hitchens.
Cy Kellett:
They’re supposed to be bad writers, yeah.
Trent Horn:
Dennett is a compatibilist, and he would say, “Well, look, when people talk about free will, they just mean the freedom to do what I want to do, the freedom from coercion.” Harris uses this analogy. He says, “I’m saying Atlantis, the underwater city where people live and Aqua man lives, doesn’t exist.” And Daniel Dennett would say, “Well, of course Atlantis exists. It’s called Venice. It’s about knee-high water, beautiful architecture. That’s what you really mean by Atlantis. Of course, Atlantis exists.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. That’s a very Daniel Dennett move.
Trent Horn:
Right. well-
Cy Kellett:
You don’t know what you’re saying, but I, Daniel Dennett, know what you’re saying.
Trent Horn:
Right. So he would say with free will, “Well, no, I’m not saying it’s free will and that you choose what to do, and you could have done otherwise.”
Cy Kellett:
It’s free will in this other sense.
Trent Horn:
But most of us would say, “Okay, I’m free to do what I want, but could I have wanted anything else?” Sometimes we have conflicting wants, and we end up doing … One of the wants beats the other one. But if it always would’ve beat the other one, am I really free? That’s why I am very open to the view that when it comes to free will, and actually some people who defend free will, don’t defend this principle, and that’s called the principle of alternate possibilities. It’s the idea that, to be free, you have to have been able to act differently. I could’ve chosen to do something else. There’s a thought experiment that tries to show that’s not the case, by, I think it’s Harry Frankfurt, is the same as philosopher, published in 1969. And he said, ” Imagine, Cy, you go into a voting booth. Right? And you need to vote for the next president. One’s nice and one’s a dictator. Okay. And we think if you vote for the dictator, you’re morally responsible because you could’ve voted for the good president.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Okay. There’s two levers to pull. Imagine there is a man named Black, because in philosophical experiments, it’s always Jones, Smith and Mr. Black.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Mr. Black put a little thing in your brain so that if you voted for the good president, it would’ve rewired your brain so that you would’ve ended up voting for the dictator president instead.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
So Black is waiting there. You go in and it turns out you voted for the dictator.
Cy Kellett:
But are you responsible?
Trent Horn:
Well, here’s the thing, because someone could say, “Even if I had voted for the good president, Black would;ve turned the thing in my brain and made me vote for the dictator anyways.” He’d say, “Well, you are responsible< even if you couldn’t have done otherwise,” is Frankfurt’s … So Frankfurt’s trying to argue, oh, what a wonderful argument.
Cy Kellett:
Right, I see what he’s saying. Yes.
Trent Horn:
He’s tying to say, “You can be responsible, even if you could not have done otherwise.” But I’m not convinced by his thought experiment.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Okay. Fair enough. But it has the elegance of this, that intention matters.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
Even in a situation where you might not be physically free to do something, what you’re intending to do, does matter.
Trent Horn:
That’s correct. And the way to respond to this, this is actually what someone who defends Frankfurt, he calls this the flicker of freedom response. The idea is that maybe you couldn’t have done … Because imagine if Black, instead of messing up your brain, he just switched the wires in the voting machine.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. Sure.
Trent Horn:
So your vote went to the wrong person. We’d still say that you’re not morally responsible because Black changed, not you. So even there, if he twists in your brain, Black still has to know your brain. There’s no way for him to know who you’re going to freely choose until you choose it.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Right.
Trent Horn:
So it doesn’t disprove your free will. You still have that flicker of freedom. That shows you could’ve done otherwise. You’re right, even if somebody physically keeps you from doing the right thing, the fact that you intend and have willed it, even in a tiny sense-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
… morally matters.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
So you put it all together, that’s the issues with free will there. Now I will say most atheists are, recently in the past 40 years or so, have gotten on the bandwagon against free will, potentially Harris, because they claim that neuroscience has disproven free will.
Cy Kellett:
This, I find utterly unconvincing.
Trent Horn:
But many people do, though.
Cy Kellett:
But they find it quite convincing because there’ll be a neuroscientific experiment that will say, for example, that there was some activity in your brain before you were conscious of making a decision. That seems utterly non-dispositive to me. That tells you nothing about free will.
Trent Horn:
The experiment you’re probably thinking of is the Benjamin Libet experiment, L-I-B-E-T. This was done back in the 1980s and has been replicated often since them. What they’ll do is they take somebody, they’ll put electrodes on their head, and they’ll have you watch a Libet clock. It’s a clock that spins really fast. You can still see it. It just spins, I don’t know, probably 10 times faster than regular clock. But you see it going and you have the electrodes connected to you. And you’re told, “All right, do a random task, like pushing a button or flexing your wrist. But don’t plan to do it, do it randomly. And then look at the clock. When you have the intention to flex your wrist, flex your wrist or push the button, look on the clock and say what number the hand was at.”
Trent Horn:
Then they put all that data together, and you’re right. What they show, they’re measuring your brainwaves with an electroencephalogram. And they’ll show that there is something that they call a readiness potential. It was actually discovered 20 years before Libet, by two German researchers, and it has a wonderful 16 letter German word that [German 00:21:58],
Cy Kellett:
Which is the size of a conjunction, in German.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, totally. That’s called the readiness potential. So what people will say is that before you consciously decide to flex your wrist or push the button, your brain was already … But here’s what’s interesting, is people interpret the experiment. That experiment can not disprove free will. People take the experiment and interpret its result. One interpretation is, your brain, during that electrical period, before you are consciously aware of pushing the button, your brain has already decided when you’re going to push the button or when you’re going to flex your wrist. Your decision to do it is just you becoming aware of what your brain already did.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
That’s one interpretation. But I, like you, would say, I don’t see that as a straightforward interpretation of what’s going on at all.
Cy Kellett:
No, it sounds like there’s a process that happens, that has various …
Trent Horn:
No, because in the end, there’s other experiments like this, that measure free will, dealing with … and try to show you the longer gaps. Libet only showed the readiness potential 200 milliseconds. Very short time.
Cy Kellett:
That is a brilliant experiment though, to show that.
Trent Horn:
Oh, yeah. And they tried to show others, but it’s all very artificial, because when I talk about you and I having free will, we always talk about free will related to major decisions where we weigh reasons.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
And we choose to act. It’s nice, we deliberate over them, over a long period of time where we say, “Okay, I have a big decision to make, option A and B. And I weigh the reasons for them.” But in the Libet experiment. And similar experiments like it, you’re not weighing reasons. It’s like, okay-
Cy Kellett:
No, I see what you’re saying.
Trent Horn:
… you sit here, push the button. And then they say, “Don’t to push the button in three seconds. Do it when you feel like doing it.” So it’s like, why do you pick this moment instead of the next moment?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, it’s irrelevant.
Trent Horn:
Well, more so than that, if you went to the store, let’s say you buy peanut butter, right? There’s going to be different jars of peanut butter on the shelf.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Why did you pick one jar instead of the other?
Cy Kellett:
Because it’s chunky.
Trent Horn:
Well, let’s say there’s 10 chunkies. Oh, why did I pick one?
Cy Kellett:
Oh, wait. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Trent Horn:
But that’s right. You don’t. So atheists and critics who say we don’t have free will, will point out that, right, we make decisions, and many times we make them unconsciously.
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
And it seems like our brain does that, but that’s fine because if I had … Just because I don’t make all of my decisions consciously, with free will, doesn’t mean I don’t make any of them with free will. If I didn’t let my unconscious be my autopilot during the day, I would go crazy. Imagine if you had to think about every single thing you do, you’d go insane.
Cy Kellett:
No, because I have an hour commute from home, and I go to sleep. In a certain sense, my brain goes to sleep from the time I leave here till the time I get home. I do the same thing every day. If I had to be conscious of every time I put the turn signal on, I would be a nut.
Trent Horn:
Right. That’s why it makes sense that our brain does this. So even in the Libet experiment, this is what I think is happening. You’ve been instructed to do something randomly. How do you choose to do something randomly? What probably happens is that you let your unconscious give you an urge.
Cy Kellett:
And then you go.
Trent Horn:
And then you go along with it because what Libet showed, actually, Libet did not believe we lacked free will. He instructed some people to think about flexing their wrist and then not do it. And he showed that in the same case, the readiness potential in the brain scan goes up, and then it flatlines. He didn’t have anything about free will, but he said that we have free won’t, that even if our brain tries to get us to do something, we’ve got 100 milliseconds to veto the decision.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yes.
Trent Horn:
And that makes sense to me, that our subconscious can give us suggestions. It, based on our character and virtues, moves us in certain directions. And we, with our conscious will, can approve or reject them. That takes the load off our conscious will, from having to come up with everything all the time. So people will bring up Libet and other experiments. A good book on this by Alfred Mele or Mili, M-E-L-E. It’s called Free, Why Science Has Not Disproven Free Will. That’s a good resource I’d recommend to our listeners. But yeah, when people bring up the neuroscience, I would say, look, you cannot get a sweeping claim-
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
… that we don’t have free will.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
That’s from an artificial experiment like this, that’s not … We all know our brain is involved in our decisions. The brain has potential. To me, it’s just, you’re in a position where your brain knows you have to do something. So it makes sense, it’s warming the engine up to do something. Not necessarily, it’s already decided what that is. But my advice for our listeners’ side, when the arguments for free will come up, this is my simple argument for free will. If we don’t have free will, we don’t have moral responsibility. We do have moral responsibility.
Cy Kellett:
Therefore …
Trent Horn:
Therefore, we have free will. So that would be, to be against the compatibilists, in premise one, would be against them, saying, “No, you need both.” And then against people like Harris, we do have more responsibility. So go back to the punishment thing with Harris. He would say, “Well, we lock people up just to make society better, not because they deserve punishment.” Well, what if I said this? What if we could prove society would have less crime if we imprisoned the family members of a criminal with the criminal? They do this in some countries, in North Korea.
Cy Kellett:
Oh. Yeah. Right.
Trent Horn:
Because think about it. If I-
Cy Kellett:
They got hardly any crime there in North Korea.
Trent Horn:
I mean, the idea of imprisoning an innocent person for the crimes of a sibling or a parent is abhorrent to us. Not just because the objection is not, well, we don’t know if that would really reduce crime. We would say that’s unjust. You can’t imprison someone for a crime they had nothing to do with.
Cy Kellett:
It’s monstrously unjust.
Trent Horn:
Even if it did make society a better place.
Cy Kellett:
Right. You can’t just do stuff because it makes society better.
Trent Horn:
Right. But the thing is, if we don’t have free will, no one’s moral responsible for anything. So for me, the arguments for more responsibility and its necessary connection to free will, I think are very strong. Of course, there’s a vast amount of literature on that. We can’t get into in this episode, but I think if people focus on that in the free will debate, that the people who want to say we don’t have free will because of neuroscience, they believe Christians are morally responsible for all kinds of bad things.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. Right.
Trent Horn:
And to tap into that deep seated intuition, to me, it’s a powerful one. And then to move us to say, “Well, if we are morally responsible, where does morality come from?” And I think it ultimately is a good way to point ourselves back to the theistic foundations of reality.
Cy Kellett:
But that’s a good reason to deny free will, is that the implications that I might be a free creature are vast.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
So I just eliminate that, that all those implications go away.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
So there’s a strategy to it.
Trent Horn:
There is. I think a lot of people do see that. And then to be held that I’m morally responsible for my actions, it’s a weighty thing. And then to understand, okay, well, what makes things right? What makes them wrong? Why have I been created? What have I been made for? These are important questions. But if we throw free will out the window, we don’t have any hope of really trying to answer them.
Cy Kellett:
No, but you can certainly understand why Sam Harris tries. It seems to me that there’s also a fault in the modern mind, and I want to ask you about this, that often, and you’ve alluded to it several times here, that there is science and then there is the meaning of that science and its implications.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
And it often seems to me that what the casual science-minded person will get sucked into is, the science says this electrical impulse goes off in your brain to 100 milliseconds before whatever. Right.
Trent Horn:
Before you are consciously aware of a decision you’ve made. That’s another problem. There’s a difference between me deciding something and me noticing I’ve decided it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, that’s correct.
Trent Horn:
There’s a slight lag there.
Cy Kellett:
But what I’m …
Trent Horn:
They’ll have the facts. They’ll have these facts.
Cy Kellett:
Here’s the thing. I think the position that we’re in is to say, I agree with all that science.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
The science seems really solid. All of the implications that you drew from it make no sense.
Trent Horn:
That’s right.
Cy Kellett:
Or they’re not necessary implications. And if they’re not necessary implications, that means they’re not scientific.
Trent Horn:
That’s right. So when it comes also to the idea of whether we have free will or not, for me, the burden of proof is on those who deny it, because it just seems obvious that we do.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
For me to give up belief in free will, it cannot just be the tentative interpretation of a scientific experiment. It would have to be evidence that is more powerful than my own perception of reality. Now that evidence can be mustard.
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
I perceive-
Cy Kellett:
The sun coming up and going down.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Sun up, sun down. I perceive it. But with all of this other evidence from astronomy, about how the solar system works and how it better explains the motion of the sun, that overcomes an intuition, right? You might even have an intuition the earth is flat. If you looked around, just think you’re on a flat disc. I perceive that. But then there’s other hypotheses that are better at explaining that, such as, well, if the sphere is large enough, parts of it will look flat to you.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Trent Horn:
But why does a ship disappear over the horizon if it’s flat?
Cy Kellett:
They get smaller as they go away.
Trent Horn:
Right. There’s some-
Cy Kellett:
I’m sorry. I’m playing around, but-
Trent Horn:
I know. We’ll do a whole episode on flat earth one day.
Cy Kellett:
Right. So what you’re saying though, is-
Trent Horn:
We can choose not to.
Cy Kellett:
An intuition, as overwhelming as my sense that I do get to choose, at least about some things-
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
… would require, not just some one experiment that shows there’s this fraction of a second difference between this and that-
Trent Horn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
… action in the brain. You would need overwhelming, and there is not overwhelming evidence.
Trent Horn:
No, there’s not. With free will, the two big arguments for it, for me, are going to be that that is what we perceive. And it is the only thing that makes sense of moral responsibility, which is also something that seems to patently be obvious and exist.
Cy Kellett:
But there are many Christians also, who deny free will.
Trent Horn:
That’s true, because-
Cy Kellett:
So we’ll talk about-
Trent Horn:
Well, they deny that we have free will. They believe in determinism. They may not believe that physical laws determine the universe, but somebody else determines it, and we don’t have free.
Cy Kellett:
We’ll talk about them next time. Thanks very much, Trent Horn.
Trent Horn:
Thank you.
Cy Kellett:
As for me, I choose to believe we have free will. And I think I actually choose that. I don’t think I have been deceived in thinking that I have free will, I think I’m free to do things. I don’t think maybe I’m always as free as I think I am. Maybe sometimes there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances having to do with my psychology and my biology, and physics, and chemistry, and all that. I’m not denying any of that. But at the root level, especially as Trent was talking about, when it gets to those major decisions that actually require deliberation, I think we decide. I think we choose, and I don’t think anybody makes us or anything makes us choose what we choose.
Cy Kellett:
Thanks for joining us. Next time we’re going to talk about Christians who say we don’t have free will. We’ll do that with Trent Horn. If you’re listening on apple, Spotify, Stitcher, then would you like and subscribe there, but also give us that five star review, that helps to grow the podcast? Maybe write a few words. I like these guys. It’s really good. And then other people will find the podcast, and we’ll grow it. If you’re watching on YouTube, we’re growing on YouTube, but his job is still in danger. Our good friend, Zach, will lose his job if you don’t like and subscribe. His job is on the line. So please like and subscribe.
Cy Kellett:
If you want to support us, you can support us at givecatholic.com. Go to givecatholic.com. And when you give, just put a little note there that says, “This is for Catholic Answers Focus.” Send us an email. We love to get your emails. Focus@catholic.com. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. See you next time, God willing, right here at Catholic Answers Focus.