University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has now posted, at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, a reply to a talk I gave in March at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. In the talk, presented by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, I discussed the reality of free will, and criticized the coterie of scientists, specifically neuroscientist Sam Harris, primatologist Robert Sapolsky, and Coyne himself, who deny it.
I welcome Coyne’s reply — the free will debate is vitally important to our understanding of ourselves and of our society.
I believe that we have libertarian free will. That is, we can freely choose our actions to a substantial extent. We are certainly influenced quite powerfully by emotions and motives that are not under our immediate control and that sometimes overwhelm us. But we do have some degree of genuine freedom to choose how we respond to these drives. We are not meat robots.
I offer four strong arguments to support that view:
- Everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers do.
- Denial of free will is self-refuting.
- Determinism, which is the ideological basis for contemporary free will denial, has been disproven by modern physics.
- Neuroscience supports the inference that free will is real.
Here, I will discuss the first argument — the fact that everyone believes that free will is real.
1. Everyone Believes in Free Will. Even Free Will Deniers Do
Coyne responds, “This is simply the argumentum ad populum: something becomes more true if more people believe it. There is no need to refute this contention; it asserts the truth of a proposition without evidence. However, Egnor goes on to present what he does see as evidence.”
My reply is twofold:
First, morality presupposes free will. No person can be held morally accountable for an act he did not choose. It is self-evident that every sentient human being invokes morality. Even serial killers get offended if you steal from them. Everyone invokes moral law in everyday life. Everyone has a moral sense, of varying degrees, so everyone at some real level believes in free will. What we believe is not merely what we say. What we believe is how we live our lives. Every free will denier, Jerry Coyne included, invokes moral law day in and day out. Morality presupposes freedom to choose right and wrong.
In Coyne’s case, there is an element of self-contradiction. Some years ago, he authored a blog post lamenting the moral impropriety of a guy who dented his car in a parking lot and drove off. If Coyne is right that there is no free will and we are meat machines, then all that happened is that a meat machine in a car machine collided with a parked car machine owned by a subsequently unhappy meat machine. If free will isn’t real, the guy who hit Coyne’s car and drove off is no more morally culpable than the car he was driving. Coyne, in his justified moral indignation at the other driver’s moral lapse, affirms his own belief in free will, at least free will in parking lots.
Second, in some sense Coyne is right that I am making an argumentum ad populum. But it is actually better understood as an argumentum ad omnes — I’m arguing that everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. I’m saying that Coyne doesn’t walk his talk. On the one hand, he writes sophistry denying free will and on the other hand, he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender. In general, his blog is full of moral proclamations — Coyne is a moralizing scold on everything you can imagine. Of course, the fact that Coyne doesn’t really believe his own arguments against free will doesn’t prove that the arguments are wrong. But, as Carl Sagan noted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Coyne’s claim that every human being, including Coyne himself, is always wrong about the experience of free will is a very extraordinary claim, for which Coyne offers no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, evidence. My suggestion to Coyne is: if you want to be taken seriously in your denial of free will, stop invoking morality. Walk your talk.
Coyne expands on his bizarre denial of morality:
I can frame “morality” as simply “the tenets that a society or faith considers laudable or deleterious because they facilitate or impede the smooth running of society”. Abrogating these tenets is considered bad, and they can be promoted simply by praising those who abide by the tenets or criticizing and punishing those who violate them. There need be no “free will” to have morality, for even though we lack free will, we are still malleable beings and can alter our behavior depending on society’s “moral code” and the praise and punishment that go with it.
“Tenets that a society… considers laudable or deleterious” are moral judgements in themselves, predicated on the capacity to freely choose right or wrong. Brain reflexes, no matter how complex, are not “tenets.” Tenets necessarily entail concepts, propositions, reasoning, and judgement, which presuppose free choice to choose the true and the good. Coyne’s imperative to “facilitate… the smooth running of society” is itself a moral imperative, an exercise of free will, a judgement based on reason about what is true and good. Physics and chemistry are amoral. Mere biological machines can’t have moral imperatives. Without free will, there are no rational choices, no tenets, and no morality of any kind.
Without Free Will, Society Would Be Like Thriving Bacteria in a Petri Dish
Bizarrely, Coyne identifies morality with “facilitation or impediment to the smooth running of society,” as if moral law in human culture were the same thing as agar in a bacterial culture. Coyne insists that compliant brain circuitry is all society needs to “morally” flourish. Even more bizarrely, he implies that when a society thrives like flourishing bacteria in a petri dish, it’s proof that it’s moral! With this nonsense, Coyne implicitly invokes behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s doctrine of operant conditioning. Skinner (1904‒1990) envisioned a world in which human beings are manipulated like trained pigeons, using reward and punishment in order to promote a harmonious “moral” society. (Skinner had at one time been a pigeon trainer.)
In 1971, Noam Chomsky famously derided Skinner’s (and by implication, Coyne’s) operant-conditioned dystopia as “a well-run concentration camp”:
Extending these thoughts, consider a well-run concentration camp with inmates spying on one another and the gas ovens smoking in the distance, and perhaps an occasional verbal hint as a reminder of the meaning of this reinforcer [note punishment being used as “reinforcer”]. It would appear to be an almost perfect world. Skinner claims that a totalitarian state is morally wrong because of its deferred aversive consequences. But in this delightful culture we have just designed, there should be no aversive consequences, immediate or deferred. Unwanted behavior will be eliminated from the start by the threat of the crematoria and the all-seeing spies… Thus all behavior would be automatically “good,” as required. There would be no punishment. Everyone would be reinforced — differentially, of course, in accordance with ability to obey the rules… [t]he culture might survive, perhaps for a thousand years.
While Coyne’s operant conditioning may promote social harmony and a “smooth running” society (perhaps for a thousand years!), enforced compliance is antithetical to a genuinely moral society. Some of the most profoundly moral movements in history — opposition to slavery, resistance to fascism, dissent from communism — were decidedly disruptive, to the point of war. A Coynean society bent on operant conditioning could save a lot of time, money, and effort by euthanizing handicapped infants, silencing the ideologically and religiously deviant, and putting down the mentally ill. That would be a more smoothly run moral society, free of irritating disharmony and pesky inefficiency. In a smooth-running society, fewer sufferers means less suffering! Coyne, who is a free will denier, an operant conditioner, and a recipient of Discovery Institute’s 2014 “Censor of the Year Award,” has a proclivity for enforced social compliance.
Morality is not conformity. A moral society is something entirely different from a well-run pigeon farm or a flourishing bottle of Drosophila. (Professor Coyne’s expertise is in the evolution of fruit flies.) A moral society is a society in which people freely choose what is morally right and freely eschew what is morally wrong.
Respect for human rights is a moral choice, and morality is unintelligible without free will.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters.