Season 5 Podcast 53 A New Voice of Freedom, Argument for the Existence of God, Episode 38, “Determinism vs Free Will: The Genetic Code.”

A New Voice of Freedom

Season 5 Podcast 53 A New Voice of Freedom, Argument for the Existence of God, Episode 38, “Determinism vs Free Will: The Genetic Code.”

Stephen Hawking in his book, The Grand Design, offered the following argument:

“Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk.”

I shall address Mr. Hawking’s argument on two levels.

Level one, I accuse Mr. Hawking of fudging when he said, “A study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk.”

Scientists cannot possibly know that artificially stimulated movements stem from desire. When a doctor taps your knee gently with a mallet, the leg responds but not because of desire. The movement is involuntary. You have no control. It would be the same if it were an electronic stimulation.

Where does desire come from? Naturally Mr. Hawking assumes desire comes from the physical body but that is not possible. A frog leg severed from the frog will jump out of a frying pan. Are we to assume the frog leg had the desire to jump out of the frying pan? Involuntary responses are not acts of desire. They are mechanical responses. As scientists love to point out, the body is a physical or biological machine. What they fail to say is that life is in the spirit not in the body. When the spirit leaves the body the body dies.

Level Two, desire is a spiritual thing not a temporal. The physical body may respond to the passion of love, but the body does not feel love. The primary fallacy of science in claiming that man is a machine or robot or animal is that science assumes there is no immortal soul that gives life to the body. The body may be stimulated to respond—that is the great value of having a physical body—but the body does not feel desire or love or passion. That is reserved for the soul or spirit.

As Descartes said, we have both a body and a spirit which Mr. Hawking denies. Again, let’s examine Hawking’s own words.

“Descartes, for instance, in order to preserve the idea of freewill, asserted that the human mind was something different from the physical world and did not follow its laws. In his view a person consists of two ingredients, a body and a soul. Bodies are nothing but ordinary machines, but the soul is not subject to scientific law.

The differences between Descartes and Hawking are rather simple. Descartes believed in God. Hawking didn’t. In the scientific mind we are animated zombies automatically responding to our environment. From that Mr. Hawking concludes.

“It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”

I agree with Mr. Hawking that the physical body is like a sophisticated biological machine. That is the genius of the physical body. It gives flesh to desire. It gives the human experience to spiritual emotions such as altruism. The body by necessity is wired to respond to stimuli such as the genetic code. However, Freewill, by necessity, resides only in the spirit. Unquestionably the spirit is subject to the flesh, and experience shows that many subordinate the desires of the spirit to the wants of the flesh which sometimes leads to self-destruction as demonstrated in addictions. The physical body cannot overcome an addiction, but the spirit can.