It’s hard to discern the main point of William Edwards’s article The Academic Quarrel over Determinism, as his argument is discursive, confusing, contradictory, and sometimes misleading. In a first reading you may dimly perceive that he has a problem with determinism, and sees the negation of determinism as evidence for free will.

But what does he mean by “free will”? He’s not explicit about it. Since he contrasts it with determinism, it appears that for Edwards free will means our physically uncaused ability to change our decisions so that, at a given moment, we could have done something other than what we did.

And what does Edwards mean by “determinism”? He seems fixated on biological determinism—the view that all our actions are coded in our genes, a “DNA-driven view of the social world,” as well as a vision that “our future…is written in our DNA.” Edwards sees little or no influence of the environment on our actions: “Our trials and triumphs…are encoded in our DNA sequence.” But no biologist is a determinist in this sense, as all of us accept that the environment has a huge effect on our actions.

In fact, philosophical determinists—who reject free will because there’s no mechanism for “decision” that is free of the physical substance of our brain—base their determinism not on DNA but on the laws of physics. Our brains are made of molecules; those molecules must obey the laws of physics; our decisions derive from brain activity; ergo, our decisions are subject not to an alterable “will” but to physical law. QED: no free will.

And you needn’t believe in pure physical determinism to reject free will. Much of the physical world, and what we deal with in everyday life, does follow the deterministic laws of classical mechanics, but there’s also true indeterminism in quantum mechanics. Yet even if there were quantum effects affecting our actions—and we have no evidence this is the case—that still doesn’t give us the kind of agency we want for free will. We can’t use our will to move electrons. Physical determinism is better described as “naturalism”: the view that the cosmos is completely governed by natural laws, including probabilistic ones like quantum mechanics.

Edwards also seems to conflate determinism with predictability: “The future cannot be precisely known or determined from the present.” But this conflation is wrong: a deterministic process can be so complicated—weather patterns are one example—that precise predictions are impossible.

But let’s ignore these problems and see how we can parse a coherent argument from Edwards’s piece. Although he gives no explicit definition, Edwards apparently construes free will, as do most people, as “contracausal” or “dualistic”: we have the ability at any instant to make more than one choice by exercising “will” that influences our molecules; we have a unique ability to overcome the laws of nature.

Edwards’s evidence for this is threefold: there is fundamental indeterminacy in nature; we feel like we have free will; and there are aspects of human mentation, like consciousness, that we don’t fully understand. Let me take these three arguments in turn.

First, as I explained above, any fundamental indeterminism in nature, such as that apparently present in quantum mechanics, doesn’t give us a scintilla of free will. Even if that indeterminism acts in our neurons and can affect behavior, it’s not an effect we can control with our thoughts.

And the feeling that we have free will—Edwards’s second argument—says nothing about the existence of free will, any more than the feeling that the Christian god exists is itself evidence for such a God. There are many subjective feelings that are illusions, and some reasons why evolution might have installed a feeling of agency in us despite the fact that we don’t have it. (For example, those who feel they have agency might have neuronal modules making them work harder, thus securing more rewards—and offspring.)

Finally, Edwards drags out the old canard of the mystery of consciousness—the Argument for Free Will from Ignorance:

Why does [consciousness] exist and what exactly is it? How does something become “aware” of something else? Gödel’s incompleteness theorems indicate that there are truths about numbers that cannot be proven through calculation or computation. In math and physics there are singularities; times and places where all “rules” break down or don’t seem to apply. Is it far-fetched to suppose that conscious choice is real, but rules, processes, and definitions don’t apply?

The answer is “Yes, it is far-fetched.” As the physicist Sean Carroll has pointed out, ditching the laws of physics in the face of mystery is both unparsimonious and unproductive:

. . . in the face of admittedly incomplete understanding, we evaluate the relative merits of competing hypotheses. In this case, one hypothesis says that the operation of the brain is affected in a rather ill-defined way by influences that are not described by the known laws of physics, and that these effects will ultimately help us make sense of human consciousness; the other says that brains are complicated, so it’s no surprise that we don’t understand everything, but that an ultimate explanation will fit comfortably within the framework of known fundamental physics. This is not really a close call; by conventional scientific measures, the idea that known physics will be able to account for the brain is enormously far in the lead.

Arguments from ignorance have repeatedly failed, as one phenomenon after another, initially imputed to numinous, divine, or preternatural causes, has eventually received a naturalistic explanation. Contracausal free will is the modern equivalent of black plague, magnetism and lightning—enigmatic phenomena that were once thought to defy natural explanation but don’t.

So much for Edwards’s arguments in favor of “contracausal” free will. He goes on to suggest that there are salubrious personal and social effects of believing in free will—that we should believe in free will, even if there are no rationally compelling reasons to do so. Edwards says this: “Needless to say, there is substantial evidence that people who believe in free will, or at least believe that they are in control of their own lives, are more prone to exhibit good mental health and productive, ethical behaviour.”