Free Will Won’t Be Vanquished — Michael Egnor

Despite rumors of its death from the likes of Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, and Robert Sapolsky, free will is alive and … willful. Against the naysayers, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers a multi pronged defense of free will, which he defines as the genuine ability to choose among alternatives. Consider the universal human belief in moral responsibility, the self-refuting nature of denying free will, evidence from physics that the universe is not fully deterministic, and experiments in neuroscience (Penfield and Libet) that show humans can distinguish and even veto actions.

Egnor adds that without free will, morality, responsibility, and justice collapse, potentially leading to systems that treat humans as controllable objects rather than moral agents. Philosophically and theologically, free will is a non-physical, spiritual capacity tied to human dignity and grounded in a creator. Free will is essential to what it means to be human and points to the soul’s immortality.

This talk took place at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith presented by Discovery Institute’s Center on Science & Culture.