ABSTRACT
Materialists, like everybody else, take it for granted that conscious decisions and conscious efforts ceaselessly determine our actions. Responsibility cannot possibly be an illusion. Rejecting free will normally makes no change in the rejecters’ lives. A human being is one thing, not two. But this one thing is very complex and, for a number of reasons, people have split it up in various ways, producing different maps of it, of which our traditional pattern of matter and spirit is just one. From the seventeenth century, when a few educated women began to want to work on the subject, the scientific community barred their entry to the profession whenever possible, far more firmly than did the communities of most of the other sciences. God was there to displace nature and provide a fully intelligible cosmos. The omnipotent God who was central to the cosmos of Galileo and Newton is gone, and this is a real change.
