The Puzzle of Free Will
Do human beings possess free will? The question has vexed philosophers and theologians for ages, to say nothing of generations of undergraduates arguing late into the night. In recent decades, science has had its say too. Neuroscientists point to experimental results suggesting that the subconscious mind acts before the conscious mind, making free will more or less impossible. And many social psychologists contend that free will is largely an illusion because environmental factors so powerfully condition our decisions.
For the philosopher Alfred Mele, the question is still far from settled. A professor at Florida State University, Mele has been studying the scientific and philosophical literature on free will for more than two decades. His most recent book, Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (Oxford University Press, 2009), was an effort to answer many of the new arguments against the reality of free will. Now, thanks to a four-year, $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Mele will be able to encourage scholars from a variety of fields to probe the question even more deeply.
This summer, Mele and his colleagues at the Big Questions in Free Will project began accepting letters of intent from scholars applying for grants to study the science of free will, the theoretical underpinnings of free will, and the theology of free will. Mele is especially eager to support proposals that take advantage of multidisciplinary approaches, bringing together the latest scientific techniques with research in the humanities. Because conceptual and linguistic clarity is crucial to the success of such collaborative work, an interdisciplinary team of experts led by Mele has developed a lexicon of key terms about free will for applicants to consult.
“I want to see us make significant progress on discovering whether we do or don’t have free will,” Mele says. “It’s not as if in four years we're going to know. But I want to push us along the way so that we can speed up our understanding of all this.”
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Mele leaves open the possibility that there is no such thing as free will. As he writes in his contribution to a recent Templeton Foundation essay series, “If it were discovered that free will really is an illusion, we would have to learn to live with that news and its consequences. But I doubt that we will make any such discovery. Belief in free will has the attractive quality of being both true and morally beneficial.” (To hear Mele discuss his own views on free will, see this Big Think video interview.)
The concept of free will was very important to Sir John Templeton, says Michael Murray, the Templeton Foundation's vice president for philosophy and theology. “It is clear from his writings that he thought individuals control their own destinies and do so by exercising free will." With so much research taking place on the subject across a range of fields, Murray thinks that this is a “strategic moment for interdisciplinary interaction on this subject” and that Mele is ideally suited to lead the effort.
Templeton.org 2.0
Last week marked the launch of the John Templeton Foundation’s new state-of-the-art website. The address remains the same, www.templeton.org, but visitors to the Foundation’s Internet platform will now find a cleaner, more eye-catching design; enhanced navigation and search features; and many new graphics and visual materials. The new website includes:
Postcard from Cambridge
On his popular Discover magazine blog, the science journalist Chris Mooney recently described the two weeks that he spent in the UK in early June as a participant in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship on Science & Religion.
Though not religious himself, Mooney reports that he found the talks on religion to be informative: “When it comes to theology, I still see great value in the clarification of religious concepts, and in learning what the most thoughtful believers actually think and argue, and why.” As for the science seminars with "experts like Alasdair Coles (religion and the brain), John Barrow (cosmology), Denis Alexander (historical models for the relationship between science and religion), and Noah Efron (science and religion in Judaism)," they "have been invaluable and insightful."
"To claim this fellowship is some kind of religious Trojan horse strikes me as pretty untenable," Mooney writes, addressing those who have criticized the Templeton-Cambridge program. "To be sure, most of the speakers presenting to us here haven’t been atheists, so far as I can tell. But all have spoken in a scholarly fashion, presenting expert takes on their respective fields. None have been preaching. I get the strong sense–and after all, this is Cambridge, a scholarly environment—that to do so would be deemed quite unseemly and inappropriate.”
