In subsequent centuries, most scientists lost their belief in the divine component of reality and were left with the non-sentient material component, stripped of sentience for no reason other than the historic fact (largely forgotten) that it was formerly required in order to defend the existence of eternal souls and of supernatural miracles. The scientists' belief today in the non-sentience of matter is based on faith just as much as the belief of people in the past in eternal souls and God was based on faith.
It turns out that there is a way (called 'process philosophy' and first developed by Alfred North Whitehead) of understanding the world, including all of the scientific theories of nature presently held by the scientific community, based on the premise that nature consists not of non-sentient matter but rather of occasions of experience with subjectivity, and no supernaturalism. With this framework as the basic premise, consciousness is a logically occurring phenomenon, and free will is logical and very real.
The notion of sentient matter is partially supported by the view of Lyn Margulis that cells are conscious, expressed in a paper for the Annals of the New York Academy of Science online here. Lyn Margulis died recently; she was elected a member of the extremely prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and is famous for convincing the initially very skeptical scientific community that some components of eukaryotic cells were originally distinct independent organisms.
Erwin Schrodinger, a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his fundamental contributions to quantum theory, rejected the notion that there is nothing in reality except non-sentient matter and energy. He said there was something more--consciousness:
"Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." [As quoted in The Observer (11 January 1931); also in Psychic Research (1931), Vol. 25, p. 91.] In his "Mind and Matter" essay, Schrodinger writes:
"Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff. Mind could not cope with this gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself--withdrawing from its conceptual creation. Hence the latter does not contain its creator....
"The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it...
"[O]ur science--Greek science--is based on objectivation, whereby it has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. But I do believe tht this is precisely the point where our present way of thinking does need to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought. That will not be easy, we must beware of blunders--blood-transfusions always needs great precaution to prevent clotting. We do not wish to lose the logical precision that our scientific thought has reached, and that is unparalleled anywhere at any epoch."
Schrodinger thus rejects the premise on which the denial of free will is based--the assumption that there is nothing in nature except non-sentient matter and energy. Unfortunately most scientists and intellectuals today still lag behind the thinking of one of the greatest physical scientists; they continue to accept as a dogma of pure faith the proposition that there exists only non-sentient matter and energy, even though this creates self-contradiction in their thinking because their daily acts of everyday routine life reflect a belief in free will even if their verbal world view dogma logically implies that free will cannot actually exist.
Max Planck, who also won the Nobel Prize in physics for contributions to quantum theory (and whose name was given to "Planck's constant"--a fundamental constant of nature), said in 1931:
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness."
Much of what I've discussed above I learned from reading books on philosophy by David Ray Griffin, who is more famous as the leading author of many books challenging the government's official 9/11 story, but who is (or was) also a philosopher and theologian at the Center for Process Studies at Claremont, CA. The books are Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy and Religion and Scientific Naturalism.
Read More Interesting Views about Free Will:
#1. Recent experimental results indicate the existence of free will. (This is the article mentioned at the beginning of this article.)
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