Human Freedom and the Limitations of Scientific Determinism

J. F. JOHNSTON, JR., is a retired partner in a
Washington, D.C. law firm and author of The Limits
of Government.

Recent developments in science have
stimulated the centuries-old debate
between proponents of determinism and those
who defend human freedom. Determinism
implies that every event, including every
human action, is causally necessitated by
prior events, so that no person could have
acted otherwise. If so, it would seem that free
will is an illusion. If we could not have
avoided acting as we did, it is pointless to
hold people morally responsible for their acts.
Man becomes merely an agglomeration of
molecules in motion or a product of genetic
evolution. Even mind and consciousness,
under the determinist view, will ultimately
be explained by the laws of inanimate matter.

Because of the prestige of science, nonscientists
are inclined to assume that what
scientists say about the natural world is likely
to be true. The prestige accorded to science
and scientists is well deserved. Science, like
all other human endeavors, nevertheless has
its limitations. Some of these have been noted
by the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking:
“Gödel’s theorem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle, and the practical impossibility
of following the evolution of even a
deterministic system that becomes chaotic,
form a core set of limitations to scientific
knowledge that only came to be appreciated
during the twentieth century.”¹ More broadly,
it can be said that science ceases to be fully
applicable whenever the question at issue
depends on phenomena that cannot be measured
or empirically observed and therefore
cannot be reduced to quantitative analysis.
Such common terms as “meaning,” “beauty”
and “justice” fall into this non-quantifiable
category.

Standard definitions of freedom include at
least four principal meanings: 1) the state of
not being coerced or constrained by necessity
or circumstances beyond one’s control; 2) the
absence of antecedent causal determination
of human decisions; 3) exemption from slavery
or involuntary restraint by others; and
4) political meanings: e.g., the right to speak,
vote, or otherwise participate in public affairs.
In this essay, we will be concerned
primarily with the second meaning. The
relevant question has been succinctly put by
Steven Pinker: “…how can we have both
explanation, with its requirement of lawful
causation, and responsibility, with its requirement
of free choice?”²

The debate over “free will” has been a
staple of Western philosophy for centuries.
Aristotle assumed as self-evident that free-
dom is a presupposition of moral action,
since one incurs responsibility only for voluntary
actions.³ This assumption has been
generally accepted by moral philosophers,
since moral philosophy would make little
sense without it. In Kant’s moral writings, for
example, morality presupposes freedom of
the will: “the will of a rational being can be
a will of its own only under the idea of
freedom…”⁴

The rise of modern science, however, has
led some observers to question the presumption
of freedom. Many (perhaps most) scientists
believe that science progresses through a
process of reduction, in which the world is
seen as an assemblage of physical parts that
can be broken apart into their elementary
constituents, whose behavior is or will eventually
be explained entirely by the laws of
physics. Determinism assumes that the state
of the world at any instant of time, including
our disposition to act, follows necessarily
from the state of the world at the immediately
preceding instant of time by reason of the
laws of physical causation. The past completely
determines the present. If determinism
is true, such human feelings as resentment,
blame, remorse, and forgiveness are
pointless and human beings are objects to be
manipulated rather than subjects of personal
relationships. The deterministic point of view
thus renders meaningless human dignity,
human rights, and much of the discourse of
customary human interaction. No one can
deny, of course, that there are serious constraints
on human freedom. These constraints
may be due to genetic, environmental, or
pathological factors or to coercion by other
people. What the proponents of freedom
assert is that, despite all of the side-constraints,
there remains a core of choice, a
sphere of action in which we may freely
choose one alternative over another.

I.

Stephen Hawking’s core set of limitations to
scientific knowledge comprise the constraints
on mathematical reasoning imposed by
Gödel’s Theorem and the unresolvable physical
facts of quantum mechanics and chaos,
which imply that some aspects of the world
are not exclusively governed by the reductionist-
determinist model.

After Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead,
in their Principia Mathematica (1910-
13), had purported to reduce arithmetic to
symbolic logic, it was widely assumed that
this formulation was, or could be made to be,
internally consistent. It would also be complete,
in the sense that the axioms of the
system are sufficient for generating all logical
truths expressible within the system. However,
Kurt Gödel showed in 1931 that, given
any finite set of rules for doing mathematics,
there will always be some mathematical statements
that can neither be proved nor disproved
by using these rules.⁵ It would be
necessary, therefore, to go outside the system
to prove its completeness—that is, one would
have to construct a “metamathematical”
proof—but this cannot be done within the
axioms of the system in question. Expressed
differently, given any consistent set of arithmetical
axioms, there are true arithmetical
statements that are not derivable from the set.
There will always be some problems that
cannot be solved within the existing set of
rules. It follows that our mathematical understanding
cannot be reduced entirely to computational
mechanisms. The system can be
understood, as a whole system, only by
intuition “outside the box” of computation.
The effort to reduce science to strict deterministic
rules is therefore doomed to failure.⁶

The puzzles posed by quantum mechanics
(QM) are among the most fascinating problems
in the history of science, which reinforce
the problematic status of determinism.
By the early twentieth century, it had been
experimentally proven that atoms were not
indivisible but instead were composed of
smaller particles, including a positively
charged nucleus surrounded by negatively
charged electrons. But there were serious
problems with the model. According to
Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism,
the orbiting electrons should exhibit certain
behavior that does not, in fact, occur.⁷

Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr and
others then developed a theory to account for
these phenomena by arguing that the energy
in a light wave is not spread uniformly over
the wave but is concentrated in bundles or
“quanta.” But this raised a further dilemma:
is light a wave or a series of particles? The two
are separate concepts in classical physics. A
particle (a photon in the case of light) is
discrete and localized, while a wave is spread
out. Astonishingly, it turned out that light
manifests both wave-like and particle-like
behavior. It seems to follow from the empirical
results that light is both a wave and a
particle (the “principle of complementarity”).
Whether it is a particle or a wave depends on
the experiment that is done. A particle is said
to be in a “superposition state” until we
detect it, whereupon the superposition collapses
to a single definite state. Prior to
detection, there is only a probability that the
particle can be found in one place or another.
This probability is described by a “wave
function,” which is not a physical state but a
mathematical function quantifying the probability
that the particle will have a given
position or momentum. When the position is
measured by an observer, the wave function
“collapses” and the position is determined.
This finding indicates that, at the quantum
level, the observer and the observed are
inextricably intertwined.

Further, two electrons emerging from a
common source (such as a random discharge
from a decaying atom), may have different
characteristics. But there is no way to tell
which electron has what characteristics until
you measure one of them. If the measurement
of electron A shows a particular characteristic,
you immediately know that electron
B has a different characteristic even
though the two electrons may be very far
away from each other. The result with respect
to particle B depends entirely on the
measurement performed on particle A. Moreover,
there is no interaction or communication
between the two because any such
interaction would violate Einstein’s theory of
special relativity (which depends on a finite
speed of light). Scientists call this phenomenon
“entanglement” or “nonlocality”;
Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”

It is sometimes argued that the “uncertainty
principle” derived from QM establishes
an absence of determinism at the heart
of nature and, therefore, supports the case for
free will. Others argue that indeterminacy
alone does not imply free will. What believers
in free will seek to establish is not indeterminism
but self-determination by individual
persons. Quantum occurrences depend on
random events, such as the random emission
of electrons from an atom. But random or
chance events are not under the control of
anything, and thus not under the control of
the actor.⁸ Being at the mercy of chance is no
more comforting than being at the mercy of
necessity. Another difficulty is posed by the
fact that quantum events occur at the very
small sub-microscopic level, and the quantum
uncertainties tend to cancel each other
out at the larger, macroscopic level.

A simpler answer to the determinist hypothesis
lies in the role of the conscious
observer, whose free choice of the means of
observation turns what is merely probable
into a physical state that is definite and
measurable. To this extent, matter is dependent
on mind. The free action of the observer
presupposes that freedom is an intrinsic characteristic
of rational beings. To be rational is
to reason; and a conclusion cannot be rational
unless the agent is free to decide among
incompatible reasons. There is, accordingly,
a strong link between volitional causation
and rationality. If our conclusions are the
result of physical necessity rather than the
free judgment of reason, then our conclusions
cannot be supported by rational argument
and “are not worth taking seriously.”⁹

The philosophical conclusion is that we,
the observers, turn potential reality (for example,
potential momentum and position)
into actuality through our observation. The
observer and the observed are part of a single
reality—a “participatory universe,” as physicist
John Wheeler called it.¹⁰ This reality
includes the process of observation; it is a
reality which has been created by the free
activity of human consciousness. This conclusion
takes us beyond the sphere of measurable,
quantitative science and into the realm
of metaphysics. Among other philosophical
consequences, this analysis provides a possible
solution to the problem of dualism: the
“mental” and the “material” are interrelated
aspects of an overall process. Reality is not a
conscious subject (mind) observing an external
thing (matter), but is a single process (“the
object-as-observed-and-conceptualized”).
Interaction between mind and matter is a
part of the overall reality. The knower always
interacts with and affects the known. John
Polkinghorne calls this approach “dual-aspect
monism,” in which mental and material
are opposite poles of a single reality.¹¹

What QM leaves us with, then, is a feeling
that quantum indeterminacy opens a gap in
the tightly-woven network of deterministic
causation, and that the human observer has a
creative role to play in the construction of
physical reality. We can take some comfort
from the conclusion that there are events at
the quantum level which have no physical
cause in the classical sense. Therefore, “nature”
must include non-material factors (such
as quantum wave functions) or else we may
have to give up the notion of causation.

Classical physics assumed that if the position,
mass, and velocity of any object could
be measured at a given instant, subsequent
positions and velocities could be precisely
determined. Quantum mechanics, as we
have seen, casts doubt on this conclusion. A
further difficulty with classical determinism
is posed by so-called “chaotic systems.” A
chaotic system is a complex or dynamical
system whose behavior exhibits a very high
degree of sensitivity to initial conditions.
Examples are storm systems, the flow of a
stream, and a game of billiards. In each case,
the overall impact of an uncountable number
of impacts cannot possibly be predicted,
except within broad limits of probability. In
chaotic systems, tiny differences in input
(e.g., changes in wind, temperature, and
humidity) can quickly become large distinctions
in output. In chaotic systems, there will
always be a small uncertainty which will be
amplified with successive iterations.¹²

The human brain is a chaotic system, since
it operates through billions of unpredictable
quantum events, including “quantum tunneling”
(a quantum occurrence in which a
particle suddenly appears in an unexpected
location). These quantum effects are amplified
chaotically through the system. Accordingly,
the brain appears to share some of the
indeterminism and non-locality of the quantum
world. Precisely how the amplified
quantum events manage to produce order
and mind-directed activity remains unknown.
Whatever the mechanism may be, there does
not appear to be any way to test the mathematical
model of a chaotic system so as to
predict precise results. We can safely conclude
that chaos theory imposes a limitation
on any attempt to support a deterministic
hypothesis.

II.

Taken together, Gödel’s theorem, QM, and
chaos theory support the conclusion that
there are elements of indeterminacy in the
natural world that leave room for human
choice. But much of the recent controversy
about determinism and freedom has occurred
in the field of biology, especially in
the subset of problems connected with evolution
and natural selection. Biology is the
science of living organisms. Non-organic
objects are for the most part subject only to
exterior forces, while organic entities are, in
substantial part, the product of internal, autonomous
forces. The French biologist Jacques
Monod, in his influential book, Chance and
Necessity (1971), identified three properties
of living beings: teleonomy (“The transmission
from generation to generation of the
invariance content characteristic of the species”);
autonomous morphogenesis (a structure
that develops from interactions within
the object itself); and reproductive invariance
(the ability of an organism to reproduce
and transmit its own basic structure from one
generation to the next).¹³ Reproductive invariance
is not absolute but is subject to
random mutations that may cause a “scrambling”
of the genetic text. These mutations
are based on microscopic events whose accumulation
may alter the organism’s structure
at the macroscopic level. Once incorporated
in the molecular structure of the organism,
the accidental mutation will be replicated
according to the laws of genetic development.
All organic evolution, Monod concluded,
is therefore the product of chance
and necessity. There does not appear to be
any source of human value in this process.
The implications are severe: “man knows at
last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling
immensity, out of which he emerged only by
chance.”¹⁴ Chance, from this perspective, is
wholly purposeless—something that happens
without any human intervention or divine
dispensation.

Contemporary biologists have spelled out
the implications of the determinist model.
E.O. Wilson, in his book, Consilience, asserts
that the “cutting edge” of science is reductionism:
the breaking apart of nature into its
physical constituents. All of nature is organized
by simple, universal laws of physics, to
which “all other laws and principles can
eventually be reduced.”¹⁵ Mind is nothing
more than the brain at work. Later, he adds
that “Mind is a stream of conscious and
subconscious experience. It is at root the
coded representation of sensory impressions.”
It involves “internal mapping,” “finely differentiated
patterns in the brain circuits,”
and “linked concepts.”¹⁶ But this analysis
exposes a flaw in materialistic determinism:
coded representations, mapping, patterns
and concepts are not physical things, and it
is not clear how physical events alone could
give rise to them.

It follows from the reductionist position
that free will is an illusion. If you could know
every process of every neuron in the nervous
system, Wilson argues, you could predict
every action. As a practical matter, total
predictability is impossible because the inputs
into the nervous system are incalculably
numerous and the principles of chaotic systems
(discussed above) therefore apply. Because
of this practical unpredictability, “the
self can go on passionately believing in free
will,” even though we know that conscious
experience is a physical phenomenon. Even
morality and religion are ultimately explainable
by the interaction of genes and environment.
“Ought is the product of a material
process,” and religions exist because “[t]here
is a hereditary selective advantage to membership
in a powerful group united by devout
belief and purpose.”¹⁷ For those who
value moral responsibility, there is very little
comfort in “consilience.”

Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s
most influential biologists, has popularized
the “selfish gene” theory of evolution.
Dawkins asserts that the body of an animal is
merely a vehicle used by genes in order to
preserve themselves unaltered. “They [genes]
are in you and in me; they created us, body
and mind; and their preservation is the
ultimate rationale for our existence…we are
their survival machines.”¹⁸ Dawkins concedes
that the human survival machine has
the property of “apparent purposiveness”
and that it has evolved “the property we call
‘consciousness’.” Human consciousness, he
admits, is “the most profound mystery facing
modern biology.”¹⁹ But biology itself cannot
solve this mystery; a solution would involve
an “ontological leap” to a wholly different
realm of discourse.²⁰ Dawkins simply evades
the philosophical issue and concludes that
consciousness is the culmination of an evolutionary
trend.

Professor Daniel Dennett, in his book,
Freedom Evolves,calls freedom of choice “a
frankly mysterious doctrine, positing something
unparalleled by anything we discover
in the causal processes of chemical reactions,
. . .or such biological processes as metabolism,
growth, immune reactions, and photosynthesis.”
²¹ For most of us, life itself and especially
consciousness are indeed mysteries. But most
of us believe, if we think about it, that
consciousness and the ideas that result from it
are not material things. The materialist, on the
other hand, assumes that we are creatures of
the natural order whose mental activity and
decisions are entirely dependent on the physical
operations of our brains. These are metaphysical
positions that divide thoughtful people
and will continue to do so. But we are able to
choose (freely) between them. This places
the determinist in the paradoxical position
of having freely chosen determinism.

One of the most perplexing problems in
the field of evolutionary science is the relative
weight that should be given to culture,
which for present purposes can be defined as
those behavioral attributes of humans that are
transmissible by social practices rather than
by genetic evolution. Darwin in the Descent
of Man (1871) argued that any animal endowed
with social instincts by natural selection
“would inevitably acquire a moral sense
or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers
had become as well, or nearly as well
developed, as in man.” After the power of
language had been acquired, “the common
opinion how each member ought to act for
the public good, would naturally become in
a paramount degree the guide to action.”²²
“The more efficient causes of progress,”
Darwin concludes, “seem to consist of a good
education during youth whilst the brain is
impressible, and of a high standard of excellence,
inculcated by the ablest and best men,
embodied in the laws, customs and traditions
of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.”
²³ This is a purely cultural description
and represents a sharp departure from explanations
of progress or regression based on
biological selection. Reconciling natural selection
and cultural change remains a perennial
problem for evolutionary biology. As E.
O. Wilson concedes, the reductionists’ confidence
in the ultimate success of the materialist
model is, at least for the present, an act
of “faith.”²⁴

Could the choices we make, although
undetermined, be simply random acts, like
the emission of an electron from an atom of
radium, and therefore not a product of our
free will? Possibly so, if the chain of causation
could be traced directly back to the random
event. But the previous discussion of quantum
phenomena shows that the effort to do so
(at least for that category of phenomena) can
result only in probabilities, not certainty.
Moreover, and more directly relevant to
human experience, the choice could not be
“random” because our process of weighing
alternatives is based on principles that are
rationally related to our choices. Such a
decision “will not be a random brute fact; it
will be explained as an instance of the conception
and weights chosen.”²⁵

Of all the decisions we make, moral
choices are among the most fundamental.
Intuitively, we tend to resist the conclusion
that the scientific model of cause-and-effect
applies to moral discourse. In moral reasoning,
“the giving of intelligible reasons displaces
the ultimately brute-factish quest for
causal regularities.”²⁶ Evolution has endowed
men with many disparate faculties and characteristics;
yet biological science cannot tell
us which of these faculties ought to prevail in
any given circumstances. The moral realm,
which is the realm of freedom and responsibility,
is not driven by natural causation but
by the “mutual interaction of self-conscious
beings through publicly assessible [sic] actions
and norms.”²⁷ Biological evolutionists
contend that norms of conduct have a genetic
basis arising out of the evolved human traits
of sociality and cooperation, which have
survival value. But cooperation as such has
no ethical value. Criminals and terrorists
cooperate. If rules of cooperation are merely
genetic, why is there an obligation to obey
them, or any others? The answer lies in
recognition of the worth and dignity of
every person, which implies a mutual respect
for others similarly endowed. This respect for
other persons differs from the instinctive sociality
of animals in that self-conscious agents
demand mutual recognition of basic human
rights and duties. In short, we cannot accept
the determinist evolutionary model of sociobiology
as the totality of human experience
without sacrificing moral responsibility.

Such human traits as altruism and selfsacrifice
pose a particular problem for evolutionary
biologists, since it is hard to see why
“selfish genes” would benefit when the host
organism denies itself the advantages of reproductive
success or acts so as to favor other
organisms. Why, for example, should humans
ever follow moral principles of sexual
restraint that result in leaving fewer descendants?
Some biologists argue that altruism for
the benefit of kin may be biologically based
because the altruist is closely related to his kin
genetically, but this seems implausible in the
case of pure altruism, such as feeding people
on the other side of the world. It is much
more likely that altruistic behavior is transmitted
by cultural rather than genetic means—
for example, through moral education and
imaginative sympathy.

If morality means anything, it must rest to
some extent on general principles and not
solely on what is in my (or my kinfolks’)
genetic interest. These moral principles cannot
be deduced from the findings of sociobiology.
Since free moral choice is a vital
aspect of human behavior, this gap in the
scientific model provokes a degree of frustration
among some biologists. As Steven Pinker
observes, morality, consciousness and free
will are “deep enigmas” and “elusive quantities
[sic] whose origins still remain wrapped
in substantial mystery…”²⁸ This honest admission
tells us that we have reached the limit
of science and have crossed over into philosophy—
specifically, into what Ernst
Cassirer called “the philosophy of symbolic
forms.”²⁹ A creature constituted solely by the
physical flux of nature could not stand outside
of, and bring order and meaning to, that flux.
Mind cannot be identical with the matter it
describes. To be conscious of natural forces,
we must be to some extent independent of
those forces through a reasoning faculty that
transcends the matter it seeks to understand.
Reason is the creative power that brings
intelligible order to the raw material of the
experienced world. The practice of science
itself is evidence of conscious choice.

The scientist does his work by applying
mathematical models to make sense of phenomena.
In addition to mathematics, scientists
cannot do without abstract, conceptual
terms such as category, pattern, code, representation,
and other symbolic expressions
used to denote the formal aspects of physical
reality. The intelligibility of the natural world,
and abstract relationships and forms such as
consistency, correlation and order, are assumed
as necessary postulates of science. The
theory and the terminology, as well as the
experiments, are freely chosen by the scientist
in order to produce an intelligible model
of reality. Indeed, the major premise of
philosophy as well as science is that the world
is intelligible.

How and when consciousness appeared
remains a mystery, but it is the basis of
language, mathematics and other symbolic
forms, without which science (and other
conceptual activities) would be impossible. It
is this realm of ideas, hypotheses, abstractions
and choices that gives us the freedom to
transcend the rigid constraints of physical
causation and biological selection, and only if
we have this kind of freedom can we be held
morally responsible for our acts. For biological
determinists, the “self” is reduced to a
complex array of electro-chemical events;
we are neurologically programmed with
impulses to do certain things and avoid
others. Such an entity could not be “free” in
any meaningful sense of the term. An entity
that is nothing more than a physical system
comprising randomly evolved components
would not be capable of self-consciousness,
and certainly could not explore or explain a
physical system.³⁰

The extraordinary complexity of species,
especially Homo sapiens, and the apparently
progressive evolution of man in the direction
of social organization and intelligence, leads
us to suspect that the evolutionary process
may have been designed. If the evolution of
intelligence was probable from the start, the
best explanation for such a process may be
that the result was intended. Most biologists
reject the design hypothesis. But their inevitable
recourse to such terms as “pattern,”
“process,” “code” and “direction” implies
the existence of some plan or purpose.³¹

Since it is self-evident to most people that
they have free will, why is it important to
pursue the topic of determinism vs. freedom?
The answer is that the belief in universal
causation, seemingly justified by the scientific
world-view, casts doubt not only on
human freedom but also on individual responsibility
and ultimately on the dignity and
worth of the person. The debate is a real one,
as evidenced by the outpouring of serious
books and articles on the subject.³² If our acts
are predetermined by material causes over
which we have no control, the implications
for law and morality would be severe. The
only basis for punishing criminal conduct
would be to deter others—meaning that we
would be treating people as objects, not as
responsible subjects. Science has proved what
we knew all along, that there are a great
many materially necessary conditions to any
human act. But these conditions are not
sufficient for a free act; there must be at least
one step involving free agency. Without this
step, we would have to discard the entire
moral history of the human race.

The world we live in is quirky, mysterious,
and dangerous. Although we live in a
hostile environment, we are sometimes able,
with conscious effort, to transcend it. In
doing so, we become aware that we are part
of an order of being which transcends the
bare struggle for existence. Consciousness is
a fundamental component of reality, like
mass and electromagnetism. It is in some
respects even more fundamental, since we
could not understand physical forces without
it. Consciousness formulates the mathematical
systems that make physical reality intelligible.
It may be a mystery to scientists and a
scandal to materialists, but it is a fact of
human life. Consciousness, in turn, brings
choice and responsibility. These are the char-
acteristics that separate us from robots. They
are worth defending.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am grateful for the helpful
comments of Professor Nicholas Capaldi, Dr. William
Martin, and Wayne Rogers; and for the invaluable help
of my assistant, Valli Roberts. They, of course, bear no
responsibility for the analysis or conclusions herein.]

1. Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell (New
   York: Bantam 2001), 139.

2. Stephen Pinker, The Blank
   Slate (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), 180.

3. Aristotle,
   Ethics, III, 1109b.

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical
   Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy (Chicago;
   University of Chicago Press, 1949), 103.

5. See Ernest
   Nagel and James R. Newman, “Gödel’s Proof,” in
   Newman, ed., The World of Mathematics (New York:
   Simon & Schuster, 1956), 3, 1668.

6. Roger Penrose,
   Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of
   Consciousness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
   Press, 1994), 192.

7. Roland Omnes, Quantum Philosophy
   (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 137-
   38.

8. Robert Kane, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will
   (Oxford and New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 2002),
   23.

9. Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and
   Its Brain (London: Routledge, 1984), 75.

10. Quoted in
    Victor J. Stenger, Timeless Reality (Amherst, NY:
    Prometheus Books, 2000), 180.

11. John Polkinghorne,
    “The Metaphysics of Divine Action,” in Robert John
    Russell et al., Chaos and Complexity: Perspectives on Divine
    Action (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Press, 1997),
    154-55.

12. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
    (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987).

13. Monod, Chance
    and Necessity (New York, 1971), 13-14.

14. ibid., 180.
15. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New
    York: Vintage, 1999), 60.

16. Ibid., 119-21.
17. Ibid.,
    274,281-82. See also Pinker, 271, concluding that our
    moral sentiments are strategies for survival, due to
    “neurobiological and evolutionary design.” Pinker argues
    that what we call mind or soul is the informationprocessing
    activity of the brain, an organ governed by the
    laws of biology (229).

18. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
    (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989),
    20.

19. Ibid., 50, 59.
20. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman
    Future (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), 166
    ff.

21. Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York:
    Viking Penguin, 2003), 100.

22. Darwin, The Descent of
    Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,1998), Chap. IV,
    101.

23. Ibid., Chap. V, 148.
24. Consilience, 147, 171,
    285.

25. . Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge,
    MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 300-01.

26. Anthony O’Hear, Beyond Evolution (Oxford and New
    York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10.

27. Ibid., 129.
28. Pinker, 240, 426.
29. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic
    Forms, (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1965).

30. I am indebted for this insight to Professor Nicholas
    Capaldi.

31. The case for design is presented in Michael
    J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Simon & Schuster,
    1996), Chapter 9.

32. Oxford has published a 630-page
    volume of essays on the subject. See above n. 8.