For forty years, one scientific experiment has been repeatedly wheeled out to tell us something rather disturbing about ourselves: you think you make decisions, but your brain has already made them for you. Christians should be concerned.
The experiment was conducted by the American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet and his colleagues in the early 1980s. Its apparent message escaped the laboratory and entered popular culture. It appeared in books, documentaries and countless discussions about consciousness. For those already attracted to the idea that human beings are essentially biological machines, Libet seemed to have supplied experimental proof.
Free will, apparently, was dead. Except that reports of its death now look decidedly premature. Libet's experiment was ingenious. Participants were asked to make a simple voluntary movement, such as flexing their wrist, whenever they felt like doing so. While they waited, they watched a rapidly moving clock and were asked to remember the position of the clock when they first became consciously aware of wanting to move. Meanwhile, electrodes measured electrical activity in their brains.
The important finding concerned something called the "readiness potential." This is a gradual change in electrical activity detectable before a voluntary movement. Libet found that this brain activity began several hundred milliseconds before his subjects reported consciously deciding to move.
That produced the philosophical bombshell. If your brain starts preparing the movement before "you" decide to make it, perhaps your conscious decision does not cause the action at all. Perhaps unconscious neural machinery makes the decision and consciousness merely receives the news afterwards? The conscious self would then resemble a passenger sitting in the back seat of a car, congratulating itself for choosing where the car is going.
This interpretation became enormously influential because it seemed to turn an ancient philosophical dispute into an experimental question. Philosophers had argued about free will for more than two thousand years. Now electrodes appeared to have settled the matter.
There were always reasons for caution. For one thing, deciding when to twitch your wrist is an extraordinarily peculiar model of human decision-making. Nobody deliberates about whether to flex a finger at 10:31:04 rather than 10:31:05. The participant has already agreed to perform the movement. The only unresolved matter is exactly when it will occur.
That is a very different psychological situation from deciding whether to marry someone, confess to a crime, change careers, betray a friend or spend one's savings on a house.
There was another problem. Libet's experiment depended upon people accurately identifying the instant at which they became conscious of an intention and then retrospectively reporting the position of a rapidly moving clock. That sounds precise, but introspection is not a laboratory stopwatch.
More recent work has driven the problem much deeper. A 2019 paper by Marcel Brass, Ariel Furstenberg and philosopher Alfred Mele examined the claim that neuroscience had disproved free will. Their conclusion was essentially that the famous readiness potential had been asked to carry far more philosophical weight than the evidence justified.
The crucial distinction is between a decision and a process leading towards a decision. Suppose you are deciding whether to order steak or fish. Neural activity associated with that decision will obviously occur before you finally settle upon the fish. Nobody should find that surprising. A decision does not necessarily materialise instantaneously from nowhere.
The same possibility exists in Libet-type experiments. Brain activity building before the movement need not mean that the brain has secretly decided and consciousness subsequently discovers what happened. It may instead be part of the process through which the decision develops.
That distinction changes everything. Finding neural activity before conscious awareness no more proves that the conscious person is irrelevant than finding activity in an aircraft cockpit before take-off proves that the pilot is not flying the aircraft.
Indeed, Brass and his colleagues argue that participants enter a Libet experiment having already formed what can be called a conditional intention. They have understood an instruction roughly equivalent to: "At some point shortly, I will move my wrist." The brain is therefore not sitting around doing nothing until a mysterious conscious command suddenly arrives. It is already operating within an intention established by the person taking part in the experiment.
Then came another substantial blow to the standard Libet story. In 2023, Antonio Triggiani and eight colleagues, including Alfred Mele, Adina Roskies, Aaron Schurger and neurologist Mark Hallett, published a major review of the question: what exactly is an intention to move, and when does it occur?
Their conclusion was uncomfortable for anyone still presenting Libet as the experiment that disproved free will. The famous measurement of conscious intention, Libet's so-called "W-time," cannot confidently tell us when the intention actually begins.
Experiments have shown that the reported timing can be shifted by different experimental manipulations. The measurement is retrospective and subjective. More fundamentally, an intention may not be an event occurring at one magically precise millisecond. It may be a process.
That sounds obvious when removed from the laboratory. Think about an ordinary decision. When exactly did you decide to buy your house? Was it when you first saw it? When you discussed it with your spouse? When you decided to make an offer? When you signed the contract? Demanding a single millisecond at which "the decision" came into existence may misunderstand the thing being measured.
There is also continuing debate about what the readiness potential itself represents. One important alternative interpretation treats it not as a neural announcement saying "decision completed," but as activity accumulating towards the point at which an action occurs. If so, the old sequence, unconscious brain decides, conscious mind finds out, body moves, becomes much harder to defend.
Neuroscience can tell us extraordinary things about what happens in the brain when people prepare and perform actions. It can measure electrical activity, identify neural networks and reveal processes of which we have no conscious awareness. But moving from "brain activity precedes reported awareness of an intention" to "therefore human beings have no free will" involves a philosophical argument that cannot simply be read from an EEG trace.
There is an additional conceptual trap hiding in the language. Of course, your brain is active before you consciously decide something. Your brain is not some alien creature living inside your skull and competing with "you" for control. Your brain is part of you.
Saying "the brain did it before the person did it" therefore already assumes a particular theory of what counts as the person. The experiment cannot establish that theory because the theory has been smuggled into the interpretation of the experiment.
This matters far beyond neuroscience. If conscious choice is merely an illusion, traditional ideas about responsibility, guilt, praise, punishment and moral agency become considerably harder to explain. A murderer, saint, thief and philanthropist would ultimately be locations at which predetermined physical processes happened to produce different behaviours.
That is one reason the Libet experiments became culturally important. They appeared to provide hard scientific support for an extraordinarily large philosophical conclusion about human nature.
But four decades of subsequent investigation have made the picture considerably less dramatic. The readiness potential remains real. Neural preparation before movement remains real. Unconscious processes unquestionably contribute to human behaviour. What has not survived nearly so well is the leap from those findings to the claim that neuroscience has discovered that conscious human agency is an illusion. That conclusion should be of interest to Christians, among others.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31059730/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37119992/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41642713/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15s0OWN4BSI