When interactions occur between theists and atheists, our disparate frames of mind often cause confusion and misunderstanding. Behind these conflicting mindsets lie two incompatible worldviews: supernaturalism and naturalism. Understand these frameworks, and you will have a key to understanding our intellectual disconnects.
At the core lies a fundamental disagreement about the relationship between mind and matter. Someone with a natural worldview places the physical universe primary and posits that consciousness or mind arrived on the scene at a later time, once the first organisms with brains evolved into existence. Not so for someone with a supernatural worldview; for them mind/intelligence/consciousness is primary, and the primal intelligence (God) created the physical universe. For the latter, mental phenomenon can exist independent of matter; for the former, mental phenomenon is produced by and dependent upon organisms in the physical world.
This fundamental disagreement is important to keep in mind when it comes to how we understand ourselves. Are we bodies that evolved to experience consciousness and thought (as someone with a natural worldview sees it), or are we souls temporarily inhabiting those bodies (as someone with a supernatural worldview believes)?
Free Will Is a Myth Because Our Neurons Control Us
For an example of how this difference in overall framework is key to understanding our intellectual disconnects, consider the debate about free will. For convenience, I’ll focus on a 2016 article in The Atlantic, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will – But we’re better off believing in it anyway” by Steve Cave. I will point out confusions which result from not taking worldviews (and their assertions about the relationship between mind and matter) into account.
The title of Cave’s article handily summarizes his argument, but let’s examine a few of his underlying points. He begins by noting the “agreement in the scientific community that the firings of neurons determine not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, dreams,” and concludes that our choices are not free but “determined” by those neurons. The argument appears straightforward and sound. But is it? Let’s step back and ask a framing question: what does the word “our” refer to in the phrase “our choices are not free”? Or to put it another way, why does Cave assume that neurons in our body are not also us?
He makes this assumption because, like most people, he is saddled with a two thousand year old concept of the self—one picked up from the supernatural framework: we are our minds, or more broadly we are “thoughts, hopes, memories, dreams” which make up our conscious experiences. Herein lies the central flaw of Cave’s article. He is trying to cling to a supernatural concept of the self in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that it’s not tenable.
The supernatural “I” must be something that can be split off from the body and exist (at least temporarily) bodilessly. This separability is required for belief in afterlife, since we see bodies rot in the ground. It is also required for the concept of God, who is defined as a kind of bodiless consciousness. Yet the message of modern neuroscience is that this can’t be: consciousness is a product of neurons, and neither the dead nor the divine have neurons. We see this again when Cave discusses Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the 1980’s which demonstrated that “conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.”
The conclusion I draw from Libet’s work is that “we” are not equal to our conscious will or conscious thoughts; rather “we” encompass our brains in addition to the thoughts those brains produce in us. Put another way, we are not souls encapsulated in bodies, we are those bodies. Yet Cave never abandons the supernatural framing of “we.” His framing leads him to the conclusion that “we” (those encapsulated souls) aren’t freely choosing our actions at all. Whereas a common sense framing based on a natural worldview would redefine “we” as “bodies with sensations,” not as “souls separable from bodies.”
If our neurons are controlling our sensations—so what? Our neurons as well as our sensations are part of “us,” and conceptually cannot impinge upon “our” freedom to act. Only when we cling to the supernatural premise that “we” are souls does a problem arise. For with supernatural framing, our bodies and neurons are something outside us, yet something neurobiology claims controls our actions. This leads to cognitive dissonance which can only be resolved by rejecting the claims of neurobiology or else switching to a natural frame.
We Lack Free Will Because We Are Predictable
We saw that adhering to supernatural framing of human identity results in “the problem of free will”; next we’ll see that supernatural framing regarding the relationship between physical existence and conscious knowledge is also problematic. Cave argues that because neuroscience “describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat,” it follows from this that “[i]n principle, we are therefore completely predictable.” This, he argues, shows that our choices are determined—that the physical world around us, including our genetic heritage, our evolutionary past, controls our behavior and makes it scientifically predictable—therefore we are not free. The syllogism here appears to be:
1. Our choices are predictable
2. Therefore they are determined
3. Therefore they are not real choices
It should be noted that this argument is not dependent upon defining ourselves as souls encapsulated in bodies. So long as there is a world outside of us (no matter how expansively we define “us”), if our choices in that world are predictable then they are determined by the world outside us.
But is it true that the predictability of our decisions entails that we are not actually making decisions? Within a supernatural frame, God’s foreknowledge of the world and its future implies that we can never make choices contrary to God’s expectations. If we could “surprise” God, it would throw into question his infallibility as well as his perfect knowledge of the world he created. Cave seems to believe that a similar concern applies to scientific knowledge. Admittedly, our scientific understanding of the world today is imperfect, but since perfect and complete scientific knowledge is possible it must follow that such perfect knowledge underlies existence (even though scientists have not got there yet). Just as God has perfect knowledge of the world he created, Cave’s reasoning is that there must be perfect scientific knowledge of the world, which scientists aspire to obtain, and that perfect knowledge entails an absolute determinism (like God’s foreknowledge) of physical events from which our actions cannot escape.
The parallel implications of determinism, rearing up in the context of God’s foreknowledge and in the context of perfect scientific knowledge, clue us in that we are stuck on a supernatural frame. When we step back and peer underneath the frame, we discover the unstated assumption that scientific descriptions and explanations are discoveries of some underlying intelligent causation that determines everything which happens in the physical world. Causation has to be seen as prescriptive for this to be the case, and in a supernatural world where mind is the ultimate cause, it is de facto prescriptive.
But prescriptive causation belongs to a supernatural worldview, not to a natural one. Within a natural frame, causal explanations are mental—they can only exist in consciousness—and therefore must be the product of brains. Given that naturalism posits the existence of a physical world prior to the existence of brains or minds, in a natural frame causation is necessarily always descriptive. It is part and parcel our scientific understanding of the world around us, which we create so that we may successfully predict events, and control them.
If you adopt a naturalistic worldview, the only things that can be deterministic are our explanations. The term cannot coherently be applied to physical reality—that reality doesn’t contain within itself inherent descriptions, explanations, or causes—not, at least, if we adopt a naturalistic frame. But it follows from this that our explanations of the world can never be perfect and infallible; those explanations are necessarily empirical and therefore falsifiable. In short, it requires a supernatural worldview to raise the scary flag of determinism. Once again, we see Cave tripped up by his framing fallacy.
Now, one might argue that it’s not a fallacy, rather just framing that some of us don’t like. But it is a fallacy in the sense of leading to an incoherent worldview and logical confusion. You can’t successfully fuse concepts which are logical companions of “mind before matter” with concepts that are logical companions of “matter before mind.” To wit, if prescriptive causation is embedded in the very nature of physical existence, how did it get there? Who or what “prescribed” it? What created those mathematical and logical connections at the moment of creating physical reality? Such presumptions are unavoidably supernatural (mind before matter). They do not fit with naturalism. They are not compatible with a “matter before mind” reality.
But We’re Better Off Believing in Free Will Anyway
The final part of Cave’s premise in his Atlantic article, is that even though there is no free will, humans are better off believing in it anyway. Specifically, he argues that there is scientific evidence that humans need to have a false belief in free will, or else will there will be disastrous consequences. “If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we be become morally irresponsible?” he asks. “And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all these institutions based on it?”
Cave refers to two scientific studies by Kathleen D. Vohs which show that when told that free will is a delusion, or that their actions are pre-determined, people are more likely to do dishonest things. But perhaps this only reveals what we already know about how most people frame human agency. As far as I can determine, Vohs’ studies do not attempt to find out the worldview or framing used by participants. This is a crucial point, since with natural framing the neurons which “determine” our behavior are also “us”; therefore agency still belongs with “us.” It is only the mistaken effort to mix supernatural framing with the science of neurobiology that leads to the feeling that we lack agency and therefore responsibility for our actions.
Easy solution: don’t make that mistake. This is because the determinism that Cave refers to is the increasingly strong biological evidence that our “thoughts, hopes, dreams” are produced by our neurons. The only way this denies us agency is if we define our neurons as “not us”. And that is an obvious framing fallacy.
Cave’s conclusion: “Believing in free will as an illusion has been found to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, less grateful toward one another.” If the research behind this is valid, then it would follow that atheists as a group should be less creative, more likely to conform, unwilling to learn from their mistakes, and so on. Based on my interactions with non-believers, I would say this is not the case. And though some atheists may cling to supernatural framing—most do not.
Nevertheless, Cave presses on with this dubious thesis. He quotes Saul Smilanski who “advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend: the idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower.” This is because “[w]e cannot afford for people to internalize the truth,” says Smilansky.
“Promoting determinism,” Cave concludes, “is complacent and dangerous.”
Cave admits that not everyone agrees—and mentions Sam Harris. “From [Harris’] vantagepoint, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better,” Cave admits. “What’s more, Harris suggests as ordinary people come to better understand how their brains work, many of the problems documented by Vohs and others will dissipate. Determinism, he writes in his book, does not mean ‘that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.’” Cave, goes on to explain that “[t]he big problem, in Harris’ view, is that people often confuse determinism with fatalism…. When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference.”
Although Harris is clearly looking at the subject from a naturalistic perspective, Cave does not seem to pick up on the importance of that perspective. We see this even more clearly when he discusses another scientist who takes a naturalistic frame—Bruce Walker.
“Walker,” Cave writes, “believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment. Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result.” Cave admits that “Walker’s definition of free will is in keeping with how a lot of ordinary people see it….following their desires, free of coercion…”
But Cave does not recognize that Walker has re-framed the definition of “we”—that in Walker’s reframing we are bodies with consciousness and that it is as those bodies that we are free, even if our consciousness itself is a lapdog to the neurons in our brains. When “we” are framed as consciousness (“will”) , the problem of our freedom becomes acute in the face of what we are learning from modern neuroscience. But expand “we” to include all of what we are—bodies with integrated consciousness, and our neurons will no longer get framed as “outsiders” dictating our thoughts and behaviors, but as another aspect of ourselves.
In the end, Cave can’t break free of supernatural framing. He dismisses Walker’s reframing as “an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst.” Cave never recognizes that free will as a concept only fits into a supernatural framework. Walker and Harris, atheists and humanists in general, have switched to a different frame—one based on natural rather than on supernatural definitions and categories. Free will can’t fit into the new framework because it is premised on the concept of a conscious will independent of the body. In the new frame, we are those bodies.
Conclusion
Unfortunately for theists, supernaturalism is a framework chained to a definition of self which is incompatible with modern neuroscience. Its advocates must define “self” as an aspect of consciousness separate from the body, for otherwise the concept of afterlife becomes incoherent. After all, afterlife requires our “soul” or essential self to leave the body at death. Even if this self is reunited with a new or idealized body in afterlife, it must be separable in the first place in order to escape death of the earthly body. This commitment extends to the concept of deity itself—God (even when idealized as mind or intelligence or compassion) is necessarily bodiless.
What neuroscience reveals is that this essential premise of supernaturalism does not fit the evidence. Rather than discovering that the physical world is a product of God or of some disembodied mind or intelligence, scientists have uncovered something quite different: mind, intelligence, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams—these are the products of bodies, produced by neurons within physical organisms. Supernaturalism, the evidence indicates, has got the basic framework of existence backward.
The free will studies by Vohs and others, which so trouble Smilansky and Cave, demonstrate the importance of converting society to a natural worldview. If we don’t abandon the old framing that defines us as a soul trapped in a body, then exposure to the facts of neurobiology could indeed lead to immorality. This is the prospect which alarms Christian apologists, who seem incapable of imagining that something other than a supernatural frame is possible. For them, atheism is little more than a supernatural heresy undermining everything valuable.
Recognize, however, that we are body beings—not soul beings, not consciousness inhabiting bodies and capable of separation at death—and the problems which Cave, Smilansky, Christian apologists and others worry about dissipate into nothing. It only makes sense that attempting to combine supernatural premises with natural reality leads to incoherence.
There is an easy solution: don’t do that.
[Note: since publication this morning, I made minor updates for clarity.]
