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The woodies seem to fly in every day about 11 a.m. and are still here when I leave about 2. I still have no names for them, as nothing suggested struck the right chord.  Here’s a preview of the next set of duck photos, which will concentrate on the wood ducks as Vashti is nesting.

Feel free to suggest names, which should reflect the fact that they’re perky and gorgeous. (The last pair was named “Frisky” and “Ruth”, with Ruth having a Jewish name.)

Click to enlarge:

The NYT “opinion” piece below is very long, and is in fact a transcript of a discussion of Christianity pitting Biblical scholar and atheist Bart Ehrman against dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Ross Douthat.  If you’ve read this website lately, you’ll know that Douthat is all over the place touting Jesus: he’s published a new book, he’s debated Steve Pinker on God, he’s written a gazillion columns highlighting his book and its reasons why we should be Christians, and in today’s piece he and Ehrman discusses the “truth” of the New Testament.

I have little respect for Douthat because his case for a divine being in general, and for Christianity in particular, simply involves the same tired old (and not dispositive) assertions, many of them based on science (e.g. the “fine-tuned” universe, the mystery of consciousness, etc.).  Douthat’s drunk the whole chalice of Kool-Aid, and is not self-critical.

Ehrman, on the other hand, is an impressive guy. He started out as a Biblical literalist and practicing fundamentalist Christian, eventually becoming a Baptist preacher. Then he realized, based on the existence of inexplicable evil in the world, that the whole Jesus-and-God story was largely bushwa, and he wrote a bunch of books showing why. He knows his Bible better than does Douthat, and can quote chapter and verse without even looking at the book.

Now Ehrman does think that there’s a factual core of the New Testament, in that he thinks the evidence for the existence of a Jesus person who taught disciples is an absolutely secure historical fact. So, he thinks, is the Crucifixion, though not the Resurrection: Ehrman has no truck with miracles, adhering to Hume’s argument that unless they are more probable than the reliability of their witnesses, they shouldn’t be accepted.  Ehrman also has no truck with mythicists (I flirt with such a position) who aren’t convinced that there was a real Jesus person. Ehrman thinks that historical-Jesus believers, who are indeed in the majority among Biblical scholars, have a solid case. (The evidence for that, though, is based largely on what’s written in the Bible.)

[UPDATE:  See comment 3 below by Roger Lambert, citing Richard Carrier’s critique of Ehrman’s view that a Jesus person absolutely existed. Carrier is a “mythicist” who doubts the existence of a Jesus person. You can see more of Carrier’s arguments here.]

At any rate, you can either hear the discussion (82 minutes) or read it (the latter is a lot faster for me) at the NYT link below. It is an object lesson (from Ehrman) on how to assess the Bible as “truth”, and also how a historian uses evidence when confronting Scripture. Ehrman spends a lot of time schooling Douthat on these issues, and Douthat comes off as a credulous schoolboy.

The main point that Ehrman wants to make in this discussion is that Jesus and then Christianity introduced to the world the idea that we should love people whom we don’t know, a view that has led to good things like hospitals and orphanages. Ehrman has just published a new book on this thesis: Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. 

I have a few doubts about that, including the fact that Ehrman takes it for granted that this was one of Jesus’s teachings without good evidence for that claim, and that the idea of loving others whom you don’t know was not invented by Christians. Ehrman may be right with respect to the West, so his book (which I haven’t read) at least has the geography of love correct, but he’s on shakier ground saying that loving strangers was indeed a teaching of Jesus. Ehrman even notes that Jesus didn’t say to love everyone, only the members of one’s tribe—Israelites. And of course some of Jesus’s teachings, like “take no thought for the morrow” or “abandoning your family and loved ones to follow me”, aren’t ones we should follow. After all, Jesus did also say that the end of the Earth and his return was nigh:

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. (Matthew 16:28).

Ehrman would surely argue that the last verse, while Jesus may have said it, was simply untrue. But if Jesus did say it, Christians have to explain it.  The fact is that, as even Ehrman admits, we have no idea what Jesus said. Ehrman sort of admits that, but then apparently has some secret way to separate what Jesus really said versus what people made up about him later.

Click the screenshot below to read, or see the article archived here. If you have some time, I think it’s worth hearing or reading.

I’ll give a few quotes from the discussion, most of them from Ehrman (indicated with an “E”; Douthat’s quotes are prefaced with a “D”). These quotes are indented, while my comments are flush left.

Ehrman’s argument:

I am absolutely not arguing that Jesus introduced the idea of love or the idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we, today, almost all of us — whether we’re Christian, agnostic, atheists, whatever we are in the West — when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. We might send a check, for example, or we retire and we decide to volunteer in a soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know and probably never will know, and who we may not like if we did get to know them.

So why do we help them? My argument in the book is that sense, that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. In Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all — you were not supposed to be helping people just because they were in need. Jesus based it in large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up. He is the one who made this part of our conscience.

. . .The idea is that if you’re going to love your neighbor, it doesn’t just mean somebody who’s within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. It means, if somebody’s in need, that’s your neighbor. That’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.

So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage. But within Israel, it’s “Love your fellow Israelite as yourself.” And Jesus is now universalizing it.

Part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals — orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor — all of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically.

. . . What I am saying is that if people claim to be followers of Jesus, they ought to follow his teachings. And his teachings are quite clear that you should care for people who are not like you — the other. You’re not supposed to bomb them back to the Stone Age, and you’re not supposed to make them suffer because you don’t like them or you don’t want them among you. You’re supposed to take care of them.

(Ehrman is referring at least in part to recent wars, and he admits that he’s a political liberal, but denies that his argument is in any way political. I believe him.) But yes, if you claim to follow Jesus’s teachings, you should follow Jesus’s teachings. And then you should leave your family and give away everything you have.

But of course the argument that The Love Everyone Idea came from Jesus is an untestable assertion, since we can’t repeat history without a Jesus person.  But if Jesus didn’t teach that, then it came from somewhere else and can be attributed simply to humanism and not credited to Christianity. It could have simply been one of the many things made up by people who wrote the Bible. After all, Ehrman claims that much of the Bible is false.

How about these teachings of Jesus?

From Matthew 6 (King James version, which is the version I’ll use): take no thought for the morrow:

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? 26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? 27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?  28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? 32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. 33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Follow me, not your family or loved ones (Luke 14:25-27):

25 And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, 26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. 27 And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

Why are Christians supposed to follow the love commandment but not the others? I don’t know, nor does Ehrman tell us.

A further problem with Ehrman’s claim is, as he says below, to Jesus “your neighbor” doesn’t just mean anybody, but apparently only fellow Israelites— members of your tribe.  But that’s not what Ehrman thinks we should do today; he think we need a new interpretation of Jesus’s words to fit the 21st century. And that means loving everyone:

E:  You can’t simply take the teachings of the New Testament and transplant them into the 21st century. If any government tried to institute, as their governmental policy, the Sermon on the Mount, they’d last about two days, period.

I’m not saying that it’s this kind of simplistic equivalent. What I am saying is that if people in power claim to be Christian, they ought to take very seriously what that means. I’m not saying that it’s going to necessarily affect immigration policy, for example. But the Bible is quite clear, even in the New Testament, that “Love your neighbor as yourself” meant your fellow Israelite, or it explicitly states that anybody who immigrates into Israel is to be treated like an Israelite.

This baffles me.  He is updating Jesus’s words here, and so we should follow Ehrman’s interpretation, not Jesus’s supposed teachings themselves. How do we know what, according to Ehrman, Jesus really said or taught, and what words were put into his mouth later? We don’t know from this interview, though perhaps it’s in Ehrman’s new book.

Ehrman: Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and really did do. But I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.

There are a lot of reasons for that.

Douthat: Give me three reasons.

Ehrman: They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event, where they both can’t be right because they’re contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn’t live in the Jewish homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They’re living decades later and are recording accounts that they’ve heard. So that’s two things: The authors living much later, and the contradiction.

The third thing is: These authors got their stories from somewhere. We don’t know where the authors lived and we don’t know who the authors were. The Gospels circulated anonymously before they had names attached to them. So we don’t know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But we don’t ——

All true. But note Ehrman’s statement, “I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.” He may think that the consistency of Jesus’s “love” message indicates that a Jesus person really taught that, but there’s also a consistency in Jesus saying that he was the son of God. Yet Ehrman believes the former but not the latter.

Here’s Ehrman explaining why he became an atheist: he couldn’t accept theodicy:

E:  I taught at Rutgers for a few years, and when I was there, I was asked to teach a class called The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Tradition. And when I got asked to teach the class, I thought it would be a great idea because I had long thought that every author of the Bible in one way or another is trying to wrestle with the problem of, especially, why the people of God suffer.

And I had realized by this time that there’s not an answer in the Bible — there are lots of different answers. And some of these answers are in conflict with each other.

. . .I came to think that the idea that any monotheistic religion has a problem with the existence of God, given the state of suffering in the world.

And I’m not a radical atheist who insists there is no God, but I don’t think there is. I don’t think there’s any kind of supernatural power that’s overseeing the world, that is active in people’s lives, that actually answers prayer. I don’t believe a God like that exists.

Douthat doesn’t have an answer for that.

Finally, is it true that Jesus did introduce the idea of loving your neighbor to the West? Well, my friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry, discussing this with me via email, decided to ask the bot Claude. Here’s the question (in bold) and Claude’s answer:

Is it true that there were a lot of Axial Age religions that promoted counterintuitive and challenging moral codes, like loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, apart from Christianity?

Yes, this is a well-documented observation among historians of religion and philosophy. The Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE, a term coined by Karl Jaspers) saw a remarkable convergence across several civilizations, where thinkers independently developed moral and ethical frameworks that challenged conventional human instincts like tribalism, revenge, and self-interest.

Here are some notable parallels:

Buddhism (5th century BCE) is perhaps the most striking example. The Buddha taught mettā (loving-kindness) toward all beings, including those who harm you. The Dhammapada contains passages urging practitioners to overcome hatred with love and to respond to anger with calm — very close in spirit to “love your enemy.”

Confucianism and Mohism in China offered related ideas. While Confucius was more measured (when asked about repaying injury with kindness, he replied “repay injury with justice”), Mozi (5th century BCE) went further with his doctrine of jiān ài (universal or impartial love), arguing that people should care for strangers and even rival states as much as their own — a radically counterintuitive position that was widely debated precisely because it cut against natural partiality.

Jainism developed ahimsa (non-violence) to an extreme degree, extending compassion and non-harm to all living creatures, including insects. This demanded extraordinary self-discipline and restraint even toward those who might threaten you.

Stoicism in Greece taught that all human beings share in a universal rational nature, and that anger and vengeance are failures of reason. Marcus Aurelius (though later than the Axial Age proper) wrote extensively about responding to hostility with understanding rather than retaliation, building on earlier Stoic foundations.

Zoroastrianism emphasized the moral duty to actively choose good over evil, framing ethics as a cosmic struggle that required personal sacrifice and integrity beyond mere self-interest.

The Hebrew prophetic tradition — figures like Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah — challenged their own society with demands for justice toward the poor, the stranger, and the marginalized, often at great personal cost.

What makes the Axial Age so fascinating to scholars is that these developments happened largely independently across cultures that had little or no contact with each other. The common thread seems to be that as societies grew more complex and urbanized, thinkers began reflecting more deeply on the gap between how people naturally behave and how they ought to behave — and many of them arrived at strikingly similar conclusions about the need to extend moral concern beyond one’s in-group.

So Christianity’s ethic of enemy-love, while distinctive in its specific theological framing, was part of a broader human pattern of moral discovery during this period. That doesn’t diminish its significance, but it does place it in a richer historical context.

Even in the West, then, there were antecedents to Jesus’s message of love.

While I have a lot of respect for Ehrman, I don’t understand how he managed to separate the wheat of “love they neighbor” from the chaff of “follow me and neglect your family and friends”.  I do think, though, that the message of treating everyone with respect (I can’t bring myself to love everyone!) would have come from humanism as a guideline equal in force to that of “love thy neighbor.” Would we lack hospitals and orphanages if Christianity didn’t exist? (Go read about what Catholic Ireland did to orphanages!)  Steve Pinker has pointed out the reason for this in recent years: we have no special privilege simply by being us. And remember that although love may have been the Christian message, for two millennia avowed Christians have flouted that dictum. It doesn’t, then have any pride of place over the similar dictum of humanism.

An incredibly powerful flash of X-rays spotted by the Einstein Probe telescope appears to be a kind of explosion first theorised more than 30 years ago

The latest Jesus and Mo, called “plan2” is an older strip but characterized as one “in which Christianity is explained”.  When it’s put this way, the nonsensical nature of the story becomes clear.

Edmund Ault has sent us some photos of mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) ducklings, and you can never see too many of these.  (We should have some in Botany Pond by April 19.)  Edmund’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These ducklings are on the River Witham, in the centre of Grantham, Lincolnshire, and are the first I have seen this year. I regularly feed the ducks on this stretch of river, but I wasn’t aware that there was a nest until I saw the brood this morning; I think they must have hatched first thing this morning (31st March). And what a brood it is: 16 ducklings!

Most of the brood are sheltering under their mother:

More:

The mother duck led her brood for a walk away from the river; when she got back to the river she happily jumped off a small concrete wall (about 3 feet high) and expected her brood to follow suit – which all of them did, although reluctantly:

The brood moved upstream and tried to scale a weir; although the weir is only about a foot high the rush of water was far too great for them and eventually they turned around and went back:

We’re getting closer and closer to finding a real Earth-like exoplanet. But finding one is only half the battle. To truly know if we’re looking at an Earth analog somewhere else in the galaxy, we have to directly image it too. That’s a job for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a planned space-based telescope whose primary job is to do precisely that. But even capturing a picture and a planet and getting spectral readings of its atmospheric chemistry still isn’t enough, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv by Kaz Gary of Ohio State and their co-authors. HWO will need to figure out how much a planet weighs first.

Fears that artificial intelligence could rise up to wipe out humanity are understandable given our steady diet of sci-fi stories depicting just that, but what is the real risk? Matthew Sparkes looks at what the experts say

AI predicted that a forgotten breast cancer drug could be repurposed to treat many respiratory and gastrointestinal viruses, and subsequent animal tests suggests it may be right

For those who want a little help composting, take a cue from James Woodford’s experience raising worms – both the small colony of wrigglers he keeps in a sensible bin in his city garden and the dumpster-sized worm farm he has that can turn even animal carcasses into nutrient-dense soil

Trust in MAHA leaders has justifiably collapsed, and the sycophants who previously glorified Dr. Jay Bhattacharya have mysteriously vanished, unwilling to even acknowledge what they helped unleash on us all.

The post Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Who Claims He “Would Have” Perfectly Controlled COVID In 2020, Can’t Even Fix A Few Broken Windows Today first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A new concept suggests SpaceX’s Starship could revolutionize a future mission to Uranus, one of the solar system’s most overlooked planets. By refueling in orbit and helping slow the spacecraft on arrival, it could cut travel time nearly in half. That’s a big deal for a mission that would otherwise take over a decade just to arrive. If it works, it could finally open the door to studying this strange, tilted world up close.

At 06:25 p.m. EDT (03:25 p.m. PDT) on April 1st, the Artemis II mission lifted off from the historic Launch Pad-39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This mission will send astronauts on a ten-day journey around the Moon and will be the first crewed mission to venture beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the Apollo Era.

A new breakthrough in wireless technology could dramatically boost internet speeds while cutting energy use—by switching from radio waves to light. Researchers have developed a tiny chip packed with dozens of miniature lasers that can transmit massive amounts of data simultaneously, reaching speeds over 360 gigabits per second in early tests.

A fossil bed in China containing animals up to 554 million years old suggests that we may have to reconsider the idea that life suddenly diversified during the Cambrian explosion

Recognising rhythmic patterns was thought to require a big brain, but a series of experiments has shown that buff-tailed bumblebees have this ability, too

About 10 billion years ago, the growth rate of supermassive black holes began to slow dramatically. To this day, the SMBH growth rate still appears to be low. There are three potential explanations for this, and researchers think they've figured out which explanation fits best.

This is a question I’ve entertained for a long time, probably because I’m preoccupied with death.  But I was curious about what would happen if astronauts, like the ones going around the Moon now, found themselves stranded in space with no way to get home, facing death from oxygen depletion or starvation. Or what would happen if the astronauts who were on the Moon years couldn’t start up the Lunar Module to get back to the Command Module and then back to Earth? Would they have been carrying something that would allow them to commit suicide quickly, avoiding a prolonged death?

I asked Jim Batterson, our resident NASA expert, and he didn’t know the answer.  I then turned to the AI bot Grok, which I got for free when X (“Twitter”)—for reasons unknown—gave me a free blue checkmark.

My question to Grok  is in bold below, and the short answer (indented) is that no, American astronauts don’t carry anything to do themselves in, though one Russian astronaut did.  Grok went though the data in 11 seconds, and spat out the following. Note that there are references (the bot gives you the links, which I haven’t included) to check the statements.

Do the astronauts carry cyanide capsules or anything they can use to commit suicide if they are stuck in space? Thought for 11s

No, astronauts do not carry cyanide capsules or any dedicated suicide pills as standard equipment.

iflscience.com

NASA has never issued suicide pills (sometimes called “L-pills” or cyanide capsules) to its astronauts, including during the Apollo lunar missions or on current ISS and Artemis programs. Astronaut Jim Lovell (Apollo 13 commander) explicitly debunked this long-standing rumor: “Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, ‘Did you have suicide pills on board?’ We didn’t, and I never heard of such a thing in the eleven years I spent as an astronaut and NASA executive.”

iflscience.com

The idea appears to stem from spy-movie tropes, urban legends, or sci-fi (e.g., the film Contact), but it has been consistently denied by NASA and astronauts. Multiple sources, including direct statements from astronauts, confirm that no such pills have ever been part of U.S. spaceflight medical kits.

quora.com

Why the rumor persists, and why pills aren’t needed anywayIn a worst-case scenario of being stranded in space with no rescue possible (e.g., a failed re-entry or detached during a spacewalk), astronauts have pointed out that the vacuum of space itself provides a relatively quick way to end life if someone chose to—by simply opening a suit valve or venting the spacecraft’s atmosphere. This would cause unconsciousness in seconds and death shortly after, making a pill unnecessary.

theguardian.com

NASA’s focus is on prevention and survival: rigorous psychological screening, crew training, rescue protocols (e.g., multiple docked return vehicles on the ISS), and detailed medical kits. Those kits contain painkillers, anti-nausea drugs, antibiotics, etc., but nothing lethal like cyanide.

nasa.gov

If an astronaut were to experience a mental health crisis in space (e.g., becoming suicidal or psychotic), NASA has written procedures: crewmates are instructed to restrain the person with duct tape and bungee cords, monitor them, and administer sedatives like Haldol or Valium (orally or by injection if needed). The goal is stabilization, not euthanasia.

cbsnews.com

One historical exception (Soviet side) The only verified case involves Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (the first person to spacewalk, in 1965 on Voskhod 2). He stated that he was issued a suicide pill for that specific high-risk mission—in case he couldn’t re-enter the spacecraft and his crewmate had to leave him behind in orbit. His suit ballooned during the walk, and he barely made it back inside after partially depressurizing it. This was not standard practice for the Soviet program overall, and no evidence exists of it being routine for cosmonauts then or now.

iflscience.com

In short, modern astronauts (NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc.) rely on engineering, training, and international rescue plans rather than personal suicide options. No agency equips crews with cyanide or equivalent for “stuck in space” scenarios.

In mid-February, Michael Shermer wrote a piece in Quillette called “The truth about free will,” the truth being that we have it, but in the compatibilist rather than the libertarian sense.  This article was a shortened version of a free-will chapter included in Shermer’s new book,  Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. 

I thought that Shermer’s article was confusing, largely because his own definition of free will seemed to smuggle in a bit of libertarianism, but also because the argument for free will seemed to say this: “We have free will because we feel like we have free will.”

Shermer then responded in the pages of Skeptic, the magazine he founded in 1992 and still edits; his response was called “Free will, determinism, and compatibilism: Shermer responds to Jerry Coyne.”  He once again argued for compatibilism, buttressing his argument with statistics showing that most philosophers accept compatibilism (59.1%), with minorities being libertarian free-willers (13.7%), determinists (12.2%, I’m in this camp though I’m not a philosopher), and those who are “other” (14.9%).  The gist of his argument seemed to be this:

I agree with Jerry and Dan that we live in a determined universe governed by laws of nature. But I disagree with Jerry that this eliminates free will, or if you prefer “volition” or “choice” (again, this entire field is, to use Jerry’s term, “muddled” with confusion of terminology). My compatibilist work-around is “self-determinism,” in which while we live under the causal net of a determined universe, we are part of that causal net ourselves, helping to determine the future as it unfolds before us, and of which we are a part. My compatibilist position is based on the best understanding of physics today. Let me explain.

Physicists tell us that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy, means that time flows forward, and therefore no future scenario can ever perfectly match one from the past. As Heraclitus’ idiom informs us, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” because you are different and the river is different. What you did in the past influences what you choose to do next in future circumstances, which are always different from the past. So, while the world is determined, we are active agents in determining our decisions going forward in a self-determined way, in the context of what already happened and what might happen. Thus, our universe is not pre-determined in a block-universe way (in which past, present, and future exist simultaneously) but rather post-determined (after the fact we can look back to determine the causal connections), and we are part of the causal net of the myriad determining factors to create that post-determined world.

Free will, Shermer wrote, is somehow to be found in billions and billions of neurons, (to paraphrase Sagan):

Coyne is unhappy with my invoking of “emergence” and says I’m being rude to him and Sapolsky and Harris in accusing them of “physics envy,” but that’s what it is! Here, for example, is Sapolsky defending his belief that free will does not exist because single neurons don’t have it: “Individual neurons don’t become causeless causes that defy gravity and help generate free will just because they’re interacting with lots of other neurons.”

In fact, billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism (or volition or free will) arises. This is why I like to ask determinists: Where is inflation in the laws and principles of physics, biology, or neuroscience? It’s not, because inflation is an emergent property arising from millions of individuals in economic exchange, a subject properly described by economists, not physicists, biologists, or neuroscientists.

I found that confusing because I saw no freedom in simply saying that humans are part of the “causal net of a determined universe.” And I was confused by the claim that “while the world is determined, we are active agents in determining our decisions going forward in a self-determined way, in the context of what already happened and what might happen.” I didn’t understand that, and it seemed to smuggle some magic into the definition. And, as I’ll show below by quoting Sam Harris, I think that compatibilism misses the key feature of most people’s view of free will (yes, there are surveys): “We could have done other than what we did.”  If you say, “yes,” then you are a free willer, but have to specify what aspect of the universe enables us to have done otherwise. If you say, “No, never,” then you are either a determinist or a compatibilist. Determinism needs no further explication, but compatibilism demands that you confect a new definition of free will—one that insists that we have it despite physical determinism.

Now there are at least a half-dozen versions of compatibilism, each proposing a different definition of the “free will” we supposedly have, so compatibilists themeslves have incompatible views about free will! It’s my belief from reading Dennett and others that compatibilism is pursued by people who think that if we don’t think we have some sort of free will, society will fall apart. People will think that without free will, we lack moral responsibility, and apart from that, we’ll all become nihilists unwilling to even get out of bed. After all, what’s the point if everything’s determined?

I have answered both of these assertions before, saying that determinists like me are not nihilists, that society can function even realizing that determinism is true, because people still feel like they have free will, and that we can have “respnsibility” without needing to have “moral responsibility,” which assumes we could have behaved otherwise.

But I’ve written about all this before. Michael was kind enough to allow me to respond to his response in the pages of Skeptic, and you can read my 2000-word response by clicking the screenshot below, or reading the article archived here. (The title comes from an old novelty song, “Yes! We have no bananas,”)

I’ll give just a few quotes from my piece; it’s short enough that you can read it in a few minutes.

[Shermer’s] smuggled-in dualism becomes clear when Shermer claims that although the action of individual neurons may be determined, “billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism (or volition or free will) arises.” But how can one neuron be governed by the laws of physics but a group of interacting neurons not be governed by the laws of physics. If they are, then there is no freedom, no volition, no “willed” control of our behavior, and no ability to have done otherwise. Yet Shermer argues that when a group of neurons cooperates, some kind of “will” arises. This dilemma won’t be resolved until Shermer explains the relevant difference between the behavior of one neuron and of a group of neurons.

. . .As Shermer notes, 59 percent of surveyed philosophers are compatibilists while the rest are almost equally divided between libertarians, determinists, and those with no opinion. He deems philosophers the “most qualified people” to pronounce on the problem, but are philosophers more qualified than neuroscientists or physicists? As Sam Harris (a neuroscientist and a determinist) said:

[Compatibilism] ignores the very source of our belief in free will: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.

. . . Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings. [JAC: I love that line.]

Importantly, the “folk” conception of free will—the libertarian version—is what most people think they have. It is that version that permeates society, the legal system, and, of course, religion, and is therefore the most important version to discuss.

And my ending:

Finally, Shermer poses what he sees as an unassailable challenge to my determinism:

In fact, billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism (or volition or free will) arises. This is why I like to ask determinists: Where is inflation [of the monetary sort] in the laws and principles of physics, biology, or neuroscience? It’s not, because inflation is an emergent property arising from millions of individuals in economic exchange, a subject properly described by economists, not physicists, biologists, or neuroscientists.

That is a red herring. Like all phenomena in human society, you won’t find monetary inflation in the laws of physics. Nor will you find academics, music, sports, or any other human endeavor. The question is not whether these phenomena are in the laws of physics, but whether they result from the laws of physicsas emergent phenomena wholly compatible with underlying naturalism. And Shermer himself said yes, they do: “we live in a determined universe governed by laws of nature.”

The problem of free will is “insoluble” only insofar as Shermer, trying to retain an idea of self-control, and ignoring the massive body of data on affecting volition, has confected a new definition that simply redescribes human behavior. The important question is this: “Is there physical determinism of human behavior or not?” Both Shermer and I agree that there is. In the end, however, Shermer seems to argue that we have free will because we feel like it. One might as well say that there’s a God because we feel like there is one.

That’s it; you can read the argument and come to your own conclusions. For some reason I can’t stop arguing about free will. I guess my persistence is also determined. . .

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