ABSTRACT
Materialists flatly deny that there is any such thing as free will, dismissing it as a necessary illusion with a certainty that has made this denial a cliche of pseudoscientific talk. People give various reasons for dismissing free will as unscientific. Mostly, however, these flow from a very common but superstitious and highly anthropomorphic view of causality as compulsion, a melodramatic picture of causes as manipulators forcing helpless objects to produce their effects. If somebody could become convinced that their free will really was an illusion, that their thoughts were quite ineffective – which, luckily, most people can’t – they would then become a helpless full-time fatalist. Thoughts can directly alter the state of the brain cells. Thus, when Einstein makes his calculation, his decision to use a certain method will surely bring about new patterns of cell arrangement, which would not have been there if he had decided otherwise.
