Well, maybe. Most materialists resort to announcing that materialist neuroscientists don’t believe it exists. Here:
The problem is a familiar one. We live in a deterministic universe. Given enough information about its present state, we could extrapolate to any past or future state with 100 per cent accuracy. Everything that has or will happen was determined at the big bang – and given that our brains are part of the physical universe, free will does not exist. Depressingly, neuroscience itself offers little comfort that this isn’t the case.
Editor Graham Lawton regards quantum indeterminacy as some kind of an excuse that doesn’t work against this “hard and unforgiving core” of determinism. Heisenberg, where are you when we need you?
Free will reminds us of one of philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s more helpful insights: Schools of thought differ on what they regard as problems and solutions. Free will is a problem for the materialist, but not for the Catholic, who sees it as one of the outcomes of a growth in virtue.
Follow UD News at Twitter!