 It's Sunday, June 13th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grothi. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international non-profit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. My guest this week is Tom Clark, founder and director of the Center for Naturalism, which is an organization in the Boston area devoted to educating the public about naturalism. He's the editor of a popular online website, naturalism.org, the web's most comprehensive collection of resources on scientific naturalism, its implications, and its applications. He's the author of Encountering Naturalism, and he's on the show today to talk about skepticism and naturalism. Welcome to For Good Reason, Tom Clark. DJ, it's a pleasure to be here. I've had a couple interviews with you before on Point of Inquiry. I love these discussions because we get into some really heady stuff. You run this Center for Naturalism. It's in the Boston area, and I think you have a kind of tough row to hoe as a non-profit professional. I mean, your mission, your whole reason for existence, juts up against almost every core belief most everyone has in our society. Maybe I should say it another way, Tom. At the JREF, at the James Randi Educational Foundation, we also push skepticism, yes, about all these nonsense beliefs in society, but we focus on pseudoscience and the paranormal. You go out of your way to push it even further. You are advancing skepticism when it comes to these big concepts like free will or the idea of the self or human nature, consciousness, ultimate moral responsibility. You're basically saying, hey, society, everything you believe is wrong and it's terrifying, and please support my non-profit. DJ, this is a wonderful, a bit of a caricature, a bit of an overstatement, but I love what you just said because it's a good foil for what I think is the case about what the Center for Naturalism is doing, which, as you're right, we are challenging some central beliefs that this culture holds near and dear to itself, but we're not saying that everything is changing. We're not saying the whole thing gets exploded and that there's nothing to hold on to. What we're trying to do at the Center for Naturalism is to challenge things like free will, the contraposal variety of free will, the self as the soul. Yes, you're right about that, but there are varieties of freedom, as Daniel Dennett puts it, that are worth wanting, that are real. The self as a construction is a very robust construction. We can still have moral responsibility, so it's not the end of the world. If you're a naturalist, that's a lot of what the Center for Naturalism is trying to do, is to reassure people that we can be naturalists and have lives worth living and dignified, morally responsible agents. So it's not quite as bad as you said so at the beginning. Not quite as bad, but as a naturalist and not as a supernaturalist, it does have these implications. Let's talk about your skepticism of free will. That's why I had you on the show. But before we get into why you're a skeptic of free will, let's start at square one. Free will, it's this belief most of us have that we choose our own choices, that we aren't just mindless robots. How is that different from what philosophers call contraposal free will or are they identical? Right. Well, the fact that we make our own choices that we choose really, I think it's pretty controversial and because we do choose really in many important respects, but the contraposal free will that I don't think exists is the idea that in a given situation, exactly as it played out, that we could have done other than what we did. And there's no evidence for that. The evidence all shows that if you stick with science, that as we make our choices, as we act from moment to moment, our behavior is completely a function of our brain and the situation, our brain and body are in at the time, such that if you reset everything to that exact same situation, the same behavior would occur again. Contraposal free will says, no, hold on, in that exact moment with everything exactly the same, I could have done something different. Right. And that's the kind of free will that the center for naturalism and most philosophers deny. It doesn't mean that we're mindless robots. We are not mindless robots. We have minds that are very real. Our choice-making capacities are completely real. They're causally effective. They do marvelous things, but we are not uncaused causers, which is what contra-causal free will really ask of us. So you're not a skeptic of the fact that we make choices, but that we make these kinds of decisions that are not determined by anything other than our will, like in a supernatural sense. That's what you're a skeptic of, that yes, we make choices, but our choices are determined, and if we had it all to do over again, we would be forced or determined to make those same choices. Right. Except the idea of us being forced by determinism is a little misleading because who's making the choice? We as organisms, as systems are making the choice, and our choice-making capacities are just as real as all the factors that determined us to be who and what we are. So we don't want to suppose that determinism is coercive in the sense of someone holding a gun to your head, but it's simply not true. Determinism or cause and effect is the medium in which life happens. Right. We can't avoid it, but we can still draw a distinction between being coerced by a situation, for instance, being in prison, a dictator, having someone riding on us in a work situation where our choices are limited, we feel coerced. On the other hand, we can feel free and we are free in situations where we're doing what we want to do. Now, in both of these situations, everything is fully caused, but yet on the one hand, we're being coerced, on the other hand, we're not. So there's a real kind of freedom that exists within a deterministic universe. It's just not contra-causal, free will, that kind of freedom. That's exactly right. It's not contra-causal. It's what philosophers call compatibilist, free will, because it's compatible with determinism if determinism actually is the case. And of course, there's debate about that, too. Right. Compatibilism, Allah, say, denit or something like that. You mentioned philosophers earlier. You know, there's kind of consensus among many schools of philosophy that there ain't no such thing as contra-causal, free will. That hasn't trickled down to everyone, but you're actually getting this view, this skepticism of free will from cognitive neuroscience and other advances that, you know, really show there's no such thing. You are arguing, though, it doesn't mean we're mindless automata. We're just somehow programmed to feel everything we feel as we live our lives. Well, let's see. Are we programmed? I suppose you could say we're naturally programmed. We're determined. And part of what it feels like to be the creatures we are is that we don't see the causes that are operating inside our heads. So, of course, we feel as if, we might very well feel as if our choices are, in a sense, undetermined because they just curtail us and we don't see the causal provenance of all the neural activity that's right up to a choice. So, yes, it might feel as if we're uncaused in some respect, but that, of course, is not a good reason to suppose that we are uncaused. And what you said about neuroscience is exactly right. That's where a lot of the pressure is coming on our traditional notion of itself as being a sort of immaterial controller. There's no evidence for that thing coming out of science. And so what neuroscience leaves is a neural system that's incredibly complex, but there's also some amazing things. But it doesn't escape causality. And if it did escape causality, that wouldn't help us at all. Maybe I should backtrack a little. When you hang out with someone who has this debate happened for me a lot. What freshman year college, right? You stay up late at night, talk, free will destiny, that sort of stuff. People say sentences like I have free will. It's actually the I in that sentence that you're denying exists. So you're not just a skeptic of Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster. You're so much of a skeptic that you deny that we actually exist, at least in terms of, you know, these little selves inside of our bodies. You know, that the mind is somehow separate from what the brain does, that there's a little me ruling the body that is only kind of the shell of me. Yes, you're right. That's exactly what I denied. I denied it with these little gods that can do things without being caused in our character, in our desires. But on the other hand, we don't stop existing as real self. It's just that the self is different than we suppose. The brain can talk a very strong robust sense of being a me inside here, looking out at the world. That sense of being a self doesn't disappear when you adopt a natural point of view about the self. That's still there. It's just that you understand, although you can't see all the causes operating, that you are a deterministic system, and you can accept that. You understand that being an uncaused cause wouldn't help you make a decision because after all, an uncaused decider doesn't have anything influencing its decision whether to go left or right. So being uncaused doesn't help us at all. It doesn't give us more responsibility. It doesn't give us control. But the self, the me, the person is still there. And we can't forget that our decision making capacity is the thing that we do and choose are just as real and causally effective as anything else in the world. That's what people routinely forget. So it's not that the self goes away in this kind of robust skepticism coming from the cognitive neurosciences. It's just that our misunderstanding of what that self really is, that goes away. Right. We take a naturalistic view of what the self is. It's a construction, a biological, psychological construction. It's very robust. We really resist it as an agent that makes decisions, that have causal powers in the world. That's still all there. That doesn't go away. But what we do realize is that every single bit of who we are comes out of a situation that ultimately we didn't choose. So we can't take ultimate credit and blame for the way we are. And that's why you call it the little God inside of us, you know, the belief that somehow it stands apart from time and space, you know, this little self that is not determined by the material world, it's somehow immaterial, right? Exactly. And my admonition to skeptics, and you're already on board, but many skeptics aren't, my admonition to skeptics is to really look at this question as yet another target for their skepticism. After all, skeptics go after the supernatural, they go after the paranormal, they go after any beliefs that aren't well-grounded with good evidence. Right? So here's a belief that's very widespread, that we're uncaused causes, that we have contra-causal free will, but it's not openly challenged very often by skeptics. And I would like to see that change. Now, I should say you are a paradigm case of someone who does challenge it. And I commend you for that. Massimo Figliucci has come out against contra-causal free will. I'm very happy to say. Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels, you know that website. They deconstruct fashionable nonsense as they put it. She's come out against contra-causal free will and Russell Blackford at his blog. A well-known secularist and atheist has also come forward. So I think this is in progress, but I would like to see some of the other heavies in the skeptical movement take on contra-causal free will as a target of their skepticism because it's ripe for the picking. I want to talk in a minute why maybe some of these, oh, bigger named skeptics don't zero in on the little God inside of us and maybe only focus on the big God, you know, that most people believe in or maybe ghosts or chakras or alternative medicine or this other stuff. But in other words, they leave free will alone. But before we get to that, I just want to talk about the everyday skeptic. You know, Tom, if you go to any skeptics in the pub gathering anywhere in the country or around the world, belief in free will is like the last sacred cow. Yes, as you said, all of us give up beliefs and ghosts. You know, we go against belief in gods or maybe psychic powers. All the supernatural claims we're skeptical of, but most skeptics hold on to the belief that the self exists and somehow that it is what free from being determined by natural causes. And that's almost a supernatural belief. If it's free from being determined by natural causes, then somehow it's supernatural, yet we don't go against that belief at these, you know, pub gatherings or wherever skeptics get together and talk about another reason they don't believe in the Loch Ness Monster. Do you think that it's just because skepticism or free will cost so much more emotionally than skepticism of UFOs or of Bigfoot? Yeah, I think that's probably the case, most certainly the case, because in questioning Bigfoot or paranormal powers, they're not going to the heart of what it means to be a human agent, whereas to be skeptical about contra-causal free will is to do exactly that. It's to really call into question our fundamental assumption about who we are. And our culture has at its heart, Western culture especially, the idea that what, it's been around for centuries, millennia, right? That the human agents are causally privileged over the natural world, that we somehow are exemptions from determinism or cause and effect in how we make our choices. And to call that into question, it's a very difficult proposition if you live with that idea all your life, that as even most skeptics have. So it's no wonder that the average skeptic on the street doesn't, it's not exploring this topic, it is extremely sensitive. But yet I think it's something that needs to be grappled with precisely because it is so central to our worldview, to our sense of ourselves. And it has, I think, many, many implications for social policy, for interpersonal attitudes that are very positive implications once we can be reassured that not everything gets exploded when we get rid of the conflict also pretty well. I like that you talked about the social implications. It's kind of an ethical imperative that's fueling your free will skepticism. And that contrasts with, or let me just say it compares with the motivations I think a lot of skeptics have when they get into their skepticism. So a lot of people get riled up about complementary and alternative medicine because of the harm that undue credulity in those topics brings to people who have those beliefs. So skeptics aren't just about, you know, being the smart people in a room saying, I don't believe this and I don't believe that. Look at those people over there. They do believe it and ha, ha, ha, I'm smarter than they are. No, there's a motivation to make the world a better place. And you're saying advancing free will skepticism actually is part of that project, that there are real kind of, there's a social benefit to looking at big issues like crime and punishment and and the justice system and all of this, in other words, social issues through the lens of free will skepticism. Very, very much so. We've got the truth about the matter on the one hand. And I think we agree with the two of us that there's no truth for the idea that we're an exception to cause and effect. And there are also, as you say, the consequences of believing that because if you hold a false belief that you're a causal exception, that you have this kind of free will, then what does that allow? It allows you to take ultimate credit for your actions and to refine ultimate blame and lots of social policies are predicated on the idea that people really could have done otherwise in the situation that they were in. So a really rich person deserves her billions, a really poor person, a homeless person deserves his lot. And so the belief in contra-causal free will, even if people aren't naming it that, lets them go around kind of feeling satisfied with the state of social affairs and the kind of despair, the social inequality that you might see looking around. Absolutely. You said it exactly right. It gives us permission to feel a kind of smug self-satisfaction and to point the finger at people who, after all, should have done otherwise, they could have done otherwise, but we chose not to out of their own free will. So you're right. And the other thing it allows us to do, it allows us to disown any responsibility for other people's problems. After all, they could just as well take care of themselves so we don't owe them anything. We don't have to take care of them. Right. There's this myth that we pat ourselves on the back with when we see a homeless person, we say, well, I would never be in his shoes. But in fact, if you had that person's life, you might well be exactly in that state of affairs. Right. Exactly. There's nothing that you and I have that's any different from the homeless person that would have allowed us to escape that state where we're in more or less the same situation. We are lucky. We are simply lucky. And so it's a billionaire, simply lucky. So and some billionaires understand this Bill Gates. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett, right. They're starting to get the message out that they didn't make it on their own. And that's such an important thing. And that's exactly what naturalism is saying. Incidentally, both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are skeptics of a piece. They're secularists. They're not big boosters of religion. Yet they are the two single largest philanthropists in human history. That's also, I think, an interesting thing to talk about. Maybe not right now. I just thought I'd mention it. Well, I think it's part of the same package. Now, I don't think either of them would go so far as to deny the free will that we're talking about. They're not ready to do that. They may have harbored their own restrictions. They would never do it in public. It's just taboo, right? To question this, and that's getting back to the issue of why skeptics haven't taken revenge on. It's simply taboo in this culture to say that free will doesn't exist. I mean, it's very much like the taboo about denying God, but perhaps even deeper. So skeptics don't take this on one because, you know, just the implications. It's kind of a revision of the self and that's hard to do. But you're saying one reason skeptics may want to take it on is because of the same kind of ethical imperative that makes them want to take on other nonsense beliefs people buy because those beliefs harm people when they hold them. And you're suggesting that the belief in free will actually causes society harm. Yes, it causes harm in several respects. One is the point we talked about that people are more likely to be uncompassionate, punitive, contemptuous, self-righteous, given the idea that they alone chose their fate and that other people could have done likewise, but simply chose not to. Another very important harm that beliefs and countercalls of free will brings on us is that we ignore the actual causes of why people do what they do and end up why people end up the way they do. Or even believe what they believe. So there's this haughty kind of skepticism that says, how dare you believe that nonsense about the Loch Ness Monster or whatever it is when all you have to do is look at the evidence and listen to my voice and you'll believe the truth when, in fact, whether you're talking to Loch Ness Monster or God or ghosts or whatever, sometimes people are determined to believe or, let's say, not forced to believe. But, you know, they're strongly influenced by the state of affairs of their life to buy into those nonsense beliefs. And so this kind of free will skepticism can actually make a skeptic be a little, have a kind of a softer touch when dealing with the credulous. I would like to think so. And I think that's all for the good. I think it's a better tactic in trying to change people's minds rather than coming across the smartier than now. Understanding that the person you're talking to, you could have been like them. You could have been the credulous Loch Ness believer. Understanding that keeps us from getting on our high horse. And the other harm that it does, as I said before, is that the belief in counterculture free will allows us to disown responsibility. It allows us to suppose that we don't owe anyone, that we need not participate in the betterment of other people's lives, because after all, they could do it themselves if they just chose to. So I want to kind of finish up on that point. You just said belief in free will is a way to disown responsibility in the social sense, you just mentioned, but some have argued that only through believing in free will, can you have any sense of moral responsibilities? So this illusion of free will that a lot of people buy into, it actually really has worked, so goes the argument. It helps us fare better in the world. It, you know, the belief that we have free selves, that selves are somehow real things inside of us pulling the strings and that they are free in this countercausal sense. It helps us get out of bed in the morning, helps us feel empowered, helps us have the sense of moral responsibility and not just that sorry, officer, I ran the red light because I have no free will, you know, that I mean that that's the fear there that you need free will or belief in it, at least, for society to exist. It's necessary even for science-minded skeptics not to, you know, butt in front of each other in line at the skeptics in the pub, or you know, this is the old canard about, you know, if you don't believe in God, won't you be morally irresponsible? Well, if you don't believe in free will, might that also be the case? Right, yeah, that's a very good point and we have to reassert people that moral responsibility and being able to hold people accountable doesn't depend on the idea that they're uncaused closers. You're right in a way that that sense of ultimate responsibility might work to encourage a certain kind of obedience, encourage a certain sense of obligation and responsibility, that might be true. But in fact, that belief can also lead to very harmful feelings of guilt and shame and that are unnecessary to hold people accountable and move on to when we're trying to act and act responsibly and be responsible. We don't need the fiction of ultimate responsibility to realize that we are moral features that can tell right from wrong, that can learn to behave ethically and that can be held responsible. All of that requires cause and effect. If we were uncaused originators of our actions, then we'd be immune to ethical injunction. We wouldn't be trainable, right? You'd be beyond good and evil, you'd stand above that. Right, and we are not beyond good and evil. We're completely a function of our social and biological conditions, such that we can be trained and usually are trained to be ethical features, ethical persons in a society. Okay, without getting off track, you just used the phrase trained and that suggests to me one of the problems with this kind of conversation, that it's a diminishment of this kind of special place that the person has in the history of Western thought. We don't talk about training people, we talk about educating them, yet you just used the kind of language that I use when I'm talking about my pet companion as I was once scolded to say instead of my dog. So training people somehow takes us down a notch, right? Right, well, there's training, there's education. There's all sorts of ways in which our behavior and beliefs get modified. But nonetheless, giving up this notion of free will is one other taking us down a peg. Very much so, yeah, because if we hold on to this exalted idea of who we are, then naturally we're gonna feel diminished when we discover it ain't necessarily so. And giving up that belief is tough, it's very difficult for people to give up belief in God. We see what agony people go through when their beliefs change. None of us like to be wrong about our fundamental function, right? So confronting this idea that we don't have this sort of supernatural free will, indeed it can bring us down a several pegs. And people can go through dark nights of the soul, or the lack of soul as I like to put it, when they assimilate the naturalistic view of who we are. But it is, it's personally possible, people get through it, people are living normal, comfortable, meaningful, and ethical lives under an act of the group of themselves. Right. The great skeptic, Sue Blackmore is counted among them. There are many who have spoken out about their skepticism of free will. And you're just issuing kind of a clarion call for more skeptics to do the same. That's exactly right, and I hope they will. So last question, Tom, if skeptics listen to your call to kind of dig into this issue, what's the next step? Someone's listening to this conversation we're having and says, well, dog on it, I'm a skeptic of ghosts and the holy ghost. And what about, you know, the ghost that I'm said to give up when I die, right? So maybe I'll give up belief in this free will self thing that we've discussed. What's the next step? Is it just a matter of, you know, going to the library or is it a complete revision of oneself? Well, I think it depends where the skeptic is. Some of them are very naturalistically inclined and it may not take all that much to get them to buy into it. I would of course recommend that people go to naturalism.org and the free will page there. It's got a lot of stuff in Free Will, including a link to a wonderful article by a philosopher named Galen Stawson who's written a page for the book, Psycho-Peteoplasia in Free Will. I would start there and check other things out at naturalism.org. We put a lot of emphasis on it at this center because no one else is doing it, but I hope that other people will start doing it. Well, I share that hope, even if I have no choice in doing so. DJ, you have a choice. It's just not an undetermined. I love it. Great discussion. I enjoyed you being on the new show. Thank you very much. Tom Clark. DJ, it was a pleasure, as always, and good luck with the show. And I just want to congratulate you on your presidency of the James Randi Education Foundation. They're lucky to have you. Well, thank you, sir. And I look forward to more discussions going forward. Thanks a lot. All right. Thanks so much, DJ. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. To get involved with an online conversation about today's show, join the discussion at forgoodreason.org. Views expressed on the show aren't necessarily the J-Ref's views. Questions and comments on the show can be sent to info at forgoodreason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. For Good Reason's music is composed for us by MA Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Christina Stevens contributed to today's show. I'm your host, DJ Growthy.