Some of things, we don't do cold opens or soft starts here on the big conversation. Alex? Well, I am glad to begin on a point of agreement with you Ben, that yes, if there is no God, there is no free will. But I think that's because of the truth of the latter of those statements. I suppose the biggest criticism that I've made of you in a video response that I made to the atheist illusion. And this show does seem to have an extraordinary capacity for putting me face-to-face.
I think that's the case of people that I've been talking smack about online. Thanks again. By the way, I should say it's a great video. I never really should have watched it if they haven't. Well, I'm going to put that in the description, I think that that glowing endorsement. The principle disagreement that I think I had with you Ben is that there was a subtle or not so subtle implication in my view that yes, with no God, there is no free will. But somehow having God can solve this problem.
I'm going to go that you don't think you can establish God's existence through reason alone, but assuming that you do believe in the existence of free will, you think it's a real thing that you have. Yes. And simultaneously saying that if there is no God, then free will makes no sense. That does read to me like an argument for God's existence, such that in order to either say that there is free will, in order to say that there is free will, one must believe in God.
And that does strike me. I mean, it's a focal. I mean, to slightly curve that or to kind of stand off the rough edges there, I would say that the argument I made is an argument for something extra natural. Sure. Now you can call that God or not God, but the thing that I'm making the argument for is that you cannot get from a materialist, Darwinist universe to free will. That is not possible.
So I know that the way you solve that is that you say that there is no free will. That's right. And what I'm saying to you is you don't act that way. I hear this all the time. People say, look, you may say there's no free will, but you don't act as though that's the case. I suppose that I'm just confused as to what it would look like for somebody to act as if they believe there was no free will.
I mean, the very argument that there is no free will that I subscribe to, at least one of the various forms that it takes is a sort of shop and how we and view that you can do as you will, you just can't will what you will. And that you are essentially just a biological machine reacting to its to its internal and evolutionary drives. That's what's happening now.
Call that nihilistic if you like. That's a separate question, but as to the question of how this would make one act, the idea that this might cause us to sort of lay around in bed all day or something.
The very mechanism that I think is responsible for eliminating the possibility of free will that is the drives that make people do what they do. Like I say, do exactly that make people do what they do they make them get out of bed in the morning. Why do you get out of bed and go and make your breakfast if there's no free will. So you go and get breakfast because there's no free will and something is driving you to do that that's outside of your control.
So the so to get back to the nihilism point which can put aside so that means that this conversation is essentially worthless in any sort of real sense. I mean, effectively we were driven here by evolutionary biology and environment to have this conversation everybody who's watching this is driven by evolutionary biology and and environment to have a particular reaction to that thing and ever round the cycle goes.
That seems like a very purposeless life. Maybe that's maybe that again, I'm drawing from a realm that is not evolutionarily biologically connected. The word purpose is is really teleology obviously has been taken out of the realm of science pretty thoroughly by by atheists and by by many people in the sciences, although I would argue that again most scientists speak in the realm of teleology literally all the time and the borrowing language from the language of teleology even when they're describing functions in particular body parts, right?
The heart pumps blood in order to keep you alive. They're constantly using language that's teleological in nature. The real question that I have and this is what goes to the question you were asking the beginning before the pre question question which was the good of religion to society one of those goods is people believing that they're free will matters and this actually is a useful thing.
So I believe that it is deeply important for people in society to believe that they have the capacity to change themselves and to make different decisions and what biology would drive them to see you say well it's biology that drives you to get out of bed in the morning which is almost Calvinist and in sort of the way that it's described right it's like your predestined to get out of the morning so thus you get out of bed in the morning but the reality is that we are constantly making decisions as though those decisions make a difference in the universe.
And what social science actually does tend to show is that when people believe that they have control over their own actions, then when they believe that they're capable of changing the way that they live, they do make those changes with more alacrity and in better directions than if they don't believe that if people tend to believe in a deterministic universe, they do act worse.
So it may work, this is going to be sort of strousey and in its implications but the that may work for you, you're a very high IQ individual who can somehow reconcile the idea of living a very purposeful life with the idea that actually there's no purpose to anything but for the vast majority of people that is not actually how they live.
And I would suggest that even in your daily life you don't get out of bed in the morning thinking man my biology is driving me this morning to get on the bike, have a great day, the sun is shining, that's my biology doing this.
And I don't think that most people who live purposeful lives, even if they believe that everything they're doing is predetermined by the world around them, by their own biology, I don't believe they actually feel that they have to engage in what they themselves would determine a illusion in order to feel a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.
Of course, but that's what the evolutionary process in my view in my worldview, I should say, has done so well is provide precisely that illusion. I mean, it's not as I mean, you say, look, you don't get out of bed in the morning thinking gosh, you know, look at my biological.
I'm not firing, yeah. Of course not because if I did, then the whole evolutionary purpose that this this illusion serves would fall away. I mean, you say that this is a fairly purposeless life and perhaps the implications that it's a bit of a depressing one.
I didn't come here to inspire optimism in people. I just think it is in fact the case. It is in fact the case that free world doesn't exist. And we may feel very nihilistic towards that, but as a wise man wants to have facts, don't care about your feelings.
And I will say that the argument against me will in my view is based on something broader than just scientific analysis or empirical research. Rather, we can build an argument I think from from a law of logic, the proposition that that P must either be true or false and it can't be both. It can't be neither. It has to be one or the other.
Now, this law of the excluded middle, one of the foundational precepts of philosophy, we can simply ask a question of any kind of mental activity. And this will be regardless of whether it's material or immaterial. That's what makes this a crucial argument and an important one, the pertinent one. Is that you can ask of that of that mental activity. Is it determined or is it not? Is it determined by anything else or is it completely undetermined by anything?
If it's undetermined by anything, then it's random and you're by definition not a control of that, which is random. If it's determined by something, then it's either determined by something further inside your mind or inside your brain or indeed inside your soul or it's determined by something external to your brain. If it's determined by something external to yourself, I should say yourself rather than your brain here to rid this conversation of any implicit materialism, exterior to yourself.
If that's what's determining the action, then clearly you're not in ultimate control of that action. If it's something inside of yourself somewhere, then all you do is push the problem back and you ask the question again, is that thing determined or is it end determined?
It's in determined, it's random determined. You keep going back until you either terminate and something outside of the self, something or I suppose something undetermined and therefore, therefore random, either of which you are completely out of control. If you say that it terminates in something like a soul, people like to do this, they say, well, with the religious philosophy, we have the benefit of introducing a soul. That doesn't solve anything.
Because you still need to, it's not a matter of having to explain the mechanism by which the soul brings about actions. That may well be a mystery. But if it is the case that whatever it is that's doing that is either determined or it's not and that if it's not, it's random and therefore out of your control. And that if it is, it ultimately terminates in something outside of yourself or something random and both of which are out of your control, free will cannot exist.
Well, that argument does that argument does rely on the complete deconstruction of the self. I mean, you're using the term self in this argument in I think a couple of different ways. You're saying something outside yourself, but then you're breaking down the self into a bunch of separate components as though the self is a computer.
If you took the self and you broke it down into a machine and there's like the micro, there's the microchip and you've got the processor, you got all these different parts of it. So it has to be coming from here or it has to be coming from here, but I think the very idea that we have of ourselves as selves is as a deciding being. And so the attempt to carve that down into so which parts of the deciding being that is an avoidance strategy. So I don't think that the argument quite holds.
If we can call the self just a deciding being then that sort of fundamental assumption that we make about the nature of the self. I don't think is going to be incompatible with atheism. How so? Because we're talking about what the self is here. I mean, atheists believe in the self. Everybody believes in this. Well, no, that's not, I mean, that I find difficult to believe. Why wouldn't atheists believe in the self? The self is a series of non deciding mechanisms as you've described.
I see that your view of the self is an atheist view of the self. A meatball wandering through space as I've put it somewhat colorfully. These sort of spinosa idea that your stone that's been thrown and you can comprehend that you've been thrown, but your stone that's been thrown, that's just the way that it is. Why would there be in atheist philosophy such a thing as a deciding self? The deciding self, the deciding being is external to the idea of an evolutionary cause.
Because again, the very word deciding suggests uncaused decision making. And you've just excluded it through your own philosophy. Like uncaused decision making, I suppose it's a concept that I think is unintelligible.
And therefore, if there is an unintelligible of the self on atheism, I suppose the thrust of the criticism that I made to essentially every point you made in that video, except for the argument from motion, is that what you're saying to me if it applies to atheism, I think simultaneously applies to theism as well. How so? An uncaused decision. I mean, what is the process by which your decision is made?
But now you're falling into the same sort of argument that I excluded at the beginning, which was I said that the beauty of religion is that there's a bunch of stuff I don't understand. So I can't explain to you how the uncaused self makes decisions. Well, then I can't explain to you how the uncooled self exists on an atheist. But you have a brain one. And I don't. Meaning that it means that you do, though.
I mean, the simple fact is that you are the one who's claiming that a reasonable materialist universe is the cause of all. And so if that's the case, you do have to explain the mechanism in a way that I certainly do not. My entire philosophy rests on the, on the positing of an entire realm of things. I don't understand in terms of their interaction with the world. Now, as I said at the very beginning, that leaves me a giant escape hatch.
I'm not going to pretend that that's not a giant escape hatch. It acts in practice as a giant escape hatch. It also tends to act as a fundamental principle of faith. Right? Again, in every moral realm, right? When you get to the problem of good and evil, right? One of the big questions is, well, how can God allow evil to take place in the world? And the fundamental religious answer, as it has been for thousands of years, is my mind is not God's, which is a giant escape hatch.
It also happens to be true from a religious point of view. Already folks, reached the end of today's show. Back here tomorrow with much, much more. Benchbarr, this is the Benchbarr show.