I wrote this little "article" a year ago in a document to wrap my head around some of these Darwinian arguments and vent a little. Just found it again and thought I'd share, fwiw:
Free Will and Darwin’s Magic Wand
That many scientists implicitly or explicitly deny that we have free will is almost comical. It is, after all, common sense that we can choose how to act, however small that choice might be.
But look, so the story goes, hasn’t science proven stronger than common sense before? You see, so the story continues, you once thought it was common sense that the earth was flat and the sun revolves around it; hasn’t science shown otherwise?
Then comes the inductive hammer:
therefore, everything common sense holds dear is fair game.
The difference between flat earth and free will, it seems to me, is this, though: that the earth is round
can be common sense – after all, it
is common sense now. Whereas full-fledged determinism
cannot be common sense. Just try living your life taking it seriously and see how it goes.
We have direct experience of free will: everyday, we take decisions, and everyone – without exception – works under the assumption that we have choices. You don’t need to be an epistemological skeptic to see that our knowledge of our own experience is much more direct than, let’s say, our knowledge of quarks and electromagnetism.
Another way this has been formulated is that any metaphysical theory that doesn’t account for such a basic experience as free will is not worth much. And as we all know, everyone loves free will, swears by it, and most importantly, lives by it. No matter what they say.
Darwinian jungle
Darwinism is a bit like the magic wand of scientific materialism: whenever you run into problems about determinism, free will, the mind-matter problem etc., just invoke evolution: something exists, therefore it must have been useful in the distant past, which explains why it exists. The problem, however, is that this sort of thinking quickly leads to “platonic heights of incoherence,” to borrow a phrase from David Berlinski.
Consciousness, some argue, evolved to help us survive. Who could deny that human ingenuity is useful in many ways? However, some of these people also claim that consciousness is just an illusion. Two things:
- An illusion is just another form of consciousness. So even if it’s an illusion, consciousness still exists and must have come about somehow.
- If by illusion you mean “something that can’t do anything”, then how could it have been evolved?
To put it another way: if you believe our consciousness is just an illusion that “soothes us” and is therefore helpful, then it clearly
does something: it would make a difference were it absent. If you believe, on the other hand, that it can’t change anything (determinism), then evolution could not have brought it about.
To their credit, many Darwinists are not prepared to give up free will so easily. What is, perhaps, morally laudable, though, only leads to more confusion.
Some believe, for example, that “ironically, we have evolved traits that allow us to overcome biology.” How is that supposed to happen? Behind such phrases, it seems to me, there’s again the implicit idea that our consciousness must have evolved somehow. Remember the Darwinian logic: it exists, therefore it has evolved. Some genetic mutation has led to a bit of consciousness, and this proved useful, and so our lucky mutant got lots of offspring, and so on.
But this (again) ignores the crucial matter of free will. Are we biologically determined? Apparently not, if we can overcome our Darwinian programming. This means we have free will. But if we have free will now, haven’t we – as humans – always had free will? And if so: couldn’t we have overridden our genetic programming in the distant past, too – just as we are capable of doing today? What, then, is left of Darwinism?
Or are these Darwinists saying that
free will itself evolved? That we are genetically determined…
not to be genetically determined? Well, at least this would fit the general logic: if it exists, it must have been useful, and therefore, it evolved. Problem solved.
Or is it? After all, by that logic, toasters also “evolved,” as did cars and central heating (to borrow again from Berlinski). Nifty devices, these, after all.
This whole confusion about free will, determinism, evolution and so on has a simple explanation, I believe: the moment you allow the slightest hint of free will, this puts mind over matter – and blows scientific materialism to pieces. But if you deny free will, on the other hand, you blow common sense to pieces. Too many people in the scientific community apparently want to have it both ways.
Darwin’s magic wand to the rescue.
Or is the denial of free will, with all its profitable shock value, while at the same time invoking Darwin to avoid being eaten by the offended mob, itself a stable evolutionary strategy?
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