Leading scientists have been questioning the existence of God a lot lately. As a lapsed Catholic turned agnostic and scientific materialist, I applaud this trend. But I am disturbed that some atheistic scientists are also questioning the existence of free will.
“It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law,” the physicist Stephen Hawking writes in The Grand Design, his latest bestseller, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow, “so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is an illusion.” Similarly, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, contends in his new book The Moral Landscape that “no account of causality leaves room for free will.” He adds, “Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.”
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