{"id":3252,"date":"2011-06-02T16:07:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/06\/sam-harris-rejects-free-will.html"},"modified":"2011-06-02T16:07:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:07:00","slug":"sam-harris-rejects-free-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/06\/sam-harris-rejects-free-will.html","title":{"rendered":"Sam Harris rejects free will"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

He can\u2019t help himself!\u00a0 Heh heh, I just had to say it.\u00a0 Anyway, Harris takes neurology in hand<\/a> and\u00a0examines everything through the prism of neurology.\u00a0 That\u2019s not unusual\u00a0 In most scholarship, folks can\u2019t resist using their pet subject as the all explaining answer to everything. So a neurologist sees everything as being explained by neuroscience.\u00a0 A biologist sees it explained with biological theory.\u00a0 A physicist, physics.\u00a0 A sociologist, sociological factors.\u00a0 And anthropologist explains everything anthropologically.\u00a0 You get the point.<\/p>\n

So Harris uses neuroscience to explain why we really don\u2019t have free will.\u00a0 Basically, it\u2019s just the same old same old that folks have wrestled with for eons, or at least centuries.\u00a0 One valiant reader braves the scorn to point this out:<\/p>\n

The Scholastic\u00ads knew much of life is automatic. Aquinas wrote that habits and customs could predetermi\u00adne the will long before Harris came along. <\/p>\n

Liberum arbitrium is better translated as free judgment. The will is the intellecti\u00adve appetite. It is impossible to desire what we do not know. The will is determined toward what is perfectly known. E.g.: that 2 2=4 is perfectly known, so the will must assent. But that \u201cThis program will help the poor\u201d is not perfectly known, and so the will is indetermin\u00adate toward it. Some other program may work better. There is \u201cplay,\u201d which is all \u201cfree\u201d really means. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In short, as much as Harris may hate to admit it, once again he has taken a caricature of what people mean when they say free will, dismissed it as well he should,\u00a0proceeded to explain what most people mean when they say free will (if, in fact, they say it at all), and declared it a bold, new revelation.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Of course some theological traditions scoff at the notion of free will.\u00a0 Most, however, have some form of understanding of free will, though usually not quite so superficial as Harris\u2019s tale\u00a0would suggest. In fact, many of the musings sound very close to what Harris is trying to say, they simply use terms that are not confined to the world of material science. <\/p>\n

So, in the end not much here.\u00a0 Just trying to take what religious folks have been kicking around for centuries, removing any but the metaphysical he seems willing to accept, and then repackaging it for those who believe there is no divine reality.\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 Fine.\u00a0 Have at it. I often find it amusing that so much of what Harris does is merely religious talk for the non-religious.\u00a0 But then, what can you do with a fellow who dogmatically believes that dogmatic beliefs are a foundational problem in history, and wants to eliminate all the religions he disagrees with because he sees them as evil because of all the religious people in history who wanted to eliminate all the religions they disagreed with.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He can\u2019t help himself!\u00a0 Heh heh, I just had to say it.\u00a0 Anyway, Harris takes neurology in hand and\u00a0examines everything through the prism of neurology.\u00a0 That\u2019s not unusual\u00a0 In most scholarship, folks can\u2019t resist using their pet subject as the all explaining answer to everything. So a neurologist sees everything as being explained by neuroscience.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2805,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSam Harris rejects free will<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"He can't help himself!  Heh heh, I just had to say it.  Anyway, Harris takes neurology in hand and examines everything through the prism of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/06\/sam-harris-rejects-free-will.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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