Scientific American Mind - USA (2020-03 & 2020-04)

OBSERVATIONS

How a Flawed

Experiment

“Proved” That

Free Will

Doesn’t Exist

It did no such thing−but the result has become

conventional wisdom nonetheless

I

n the second half of the 19th century, scientific

discoveries—in particular, Charles Darwin’s theo-

ry of evolution—meant that Christian beliefs

were no longer feasible as a way of explaining the

world. The authority of the Bible as an explanatory

text was fatally damaged. The new findings of sci-

ence could be utilized to provide an alternative

conceptual system to make sense of the world—

a system that insisted that nothing existed apart

from basic particles of matter and that all phenom-

ena could be explained in terms of the organiza-

tion and the interaction of these particles.

One of the most fervent of late 19th-century

materialists, T. H. Huxley, described human beings

as “conscious automata” with no free will. As he

explained in 1874, “Volitions do not enter into the

chain of causation.... The feeling that we call voli-

tion is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the

symbol of that state of the brain which is the im-

mediate cause.”

This was a very early formulation of an idea

that has become commonplace among modern

scientists and philosophers who hold similar mate-

rialist views: that free will is an illusion. According

to Daniel Wegner, for instance, “The experience

of willing an act arises from interpreting one’s

thought as the cause of the act.” In other words,

our sense of making choices or decisions is just

an awareness of what the brain has already decid-

ed for us. When we become aware of the brain’s GETTY IMAGES

Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology

at Leeds Beckett University in England. He is author

of Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality

to Make Sense of the World.

OPINION