By Dr. Zia H. Shah, MD — for The Muslim Times / thequran.love

ABSTRACT

Two of the most articulate science communicators of our age — the American cosmologist Sean Carroll and the British physicist Jim Al-Khalili — have lent their considerable authority to the denial of libertarian free will. Carroll, a “poetic naturalist” and adherent of the Everettian (Many-Worlds) interpretation, holds that whether physics is deterministic or merely probabilistic is “a red herring” for free will: in his view, human beings are collections of atoms obeying laws, and any “supra-physical human volition” that exploited quantum indeterminacy would not be using quantum mechanics but violating it. Al-Khalili, while affirming a kind of free will, grounds it not in quantum indeterminism — which he regards as irrelevant — but in the practical unpredictability furnished by chaos theory within a fundamentally deterministic universe. Both men therefore agree on the decisive negative claim: quantum indeterminism is mere uncontrollable randomness, and randomness is not control, so the collapse of classical determinism does nothing to rescue genuine agency. This essay refutes that conclusion. Drawing on Arthur Stanley Eddington’s argument that the advent of quantum theory caused science to “withdraw its moral opposition to free-will,” and marshalling the convergent work of Henry Stapp, John Conway and Simon Kochen, Christopher Fuchs, David Layzer, George Ellis, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, and David Bohm, I argue that the “randomness is not control” objection rests on an unexamined assumption — that the only candidates are blind determinism and blind chance. The orthodox (von Neumann–Wigner) formulation of quantum mechanics supplies a third option: a conscious, selecting agency that is neither determined by the prior physical state nor reducible to chance. Indeterminism is necessary but not sufficient for free will; consciousness supplies the missing causal selection. I acknowledge honestly that this remains a minority position and that the mainstream of physics and philosophy disputes it, but I contend that the skeptics’ confidence vastly outruns their evidence.

KEY FINDINGS

• Carroll’s position is a sophisticated compatibilism resting on Many-Worlds determinism. He explicitly rejects libertarian free will as a “violation” of quantum mechanics rather than a use of it, and treats determinism-versus-indeterminism as irrelevant (“a red herring”) to the question.
• Al-Khalili rejects quantum mechanics as a basis for free will and instead rests his case on chaos-theoretic unpredictability — a move critics (including the biologist Jerry Coyne) rightly note conflates epistemic unpredictability with genuine ontological freedom.
• Eddington, writing in 1928, articulated the foundational counter-thesis: indeterminism removes the old physical veto on volition, and “the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.”
• A whole tradition of serious physicists — Stapp, Conway/Kochen, Fuchs, Layzer, Ellis, Penrose/Hameroff, Bohm — has developed rigorous frameworks in which mind, agency, or genuine novelty has a foothold in physical reality.
• The “randomness is not control” objection (the “luck objection”) is real and forceful, but it is not decisive: it assumes a false dichotomy between determination and chance, ignoring a non-physical selecting agency operating at the moment of quantum collapse.

MAIN BODY

I. Introduction: The Stakes

The question of free will is not an idle academic puzzle. It bears on moral responsibility, on the meaningfulness of human striving, and — for the religious believer — on accountability before God. For the Muslim, as for the Jew and the Christian, the reality of moral choice is woven into the fabric of revelation: human beings are addressed as responsible agents, capable of obeying or disobeying, and judged accordingly. A physics that genuinely ruled out free will would stand in stark tension with this vision. It is therefore worth examining, carefully and without intimidation, whether the physics actually does any such thing.

The remarkable thesis of this essay is that it does the opposite. The very revolution that overthrew the clockwork universe of Laplace — the quantum revolution — reopened the door that classical determinism had slammed shut. The men who deny this, Carroll and Al-Khalili among them, do so not because the physics compels them but because of a prior metaphysical commitment to materialism.

II. Sean Carroll’s Case Against Libertarian Free Will

Sean Carroll is among the most formidable defenders of naturalism writing today, and his position deserves to be stated in its strongest form. Carroll is a compatibilist: he holds that “free will” in a useful sense — “a useful theory of macroscopic human behavior models people as rational agents capable of making choices” — is “completely compatible with the underlying laws of physics, whether they are deterministic or not.” He has memorably defended this in his essay “Free Will is as Real as Baseball,” and in a 2011 exchange with Jerry Coyne he wrote: “Our ability to make choices is as real as natural selection… You are allowed to say that free will is an illusion, but to be consistent you would have to also say that natural selection is an illusion.” whyevolutionistruewhyevolutionistrue

But Carroll is equally clear in rejecting libertarian (contra-causal) free will. In his 2011 post “On Determinism,” he framed the issue precisely: “if you want to use the lack of determinism in quantum mechanics to make room for supra-physical human volition… then let’s be clear: you are not making use of the rules of quantum mechanics, you are simply violating them. Quantum mechanics doesn’t say ‘we don’t know what’s going to happen, but maybe our ineffable spirit energies are secretly making the choices’; it says ‘the probability of an outcome is the modulus squared of the quantum amplitude,’ full stop. Just because there are probabilities doesn’t mean there is room for free will in that sense.”

Two further features of Carroll’s view must be noted. First, he is an adherent of the Everettian Many-Worlds Interpretation, which is fully deterministic: the universal wavefunction evolves smoothly and unitarily, and all outcomes occur in branching worlds. On this view there is no genuine indeterminism at all — the apparent randomness is merely self-locating uncertainty about which branch one inhabits. Second, Carroll’s “poetic naturalism” (developed in his 2016 book The Big Picture) holds that there is one natural world and that “there are many ways of talking about” it; “free will” is a higher-level vocabulary, legitimate at its own level of description but never licensing any deviation from the underlying physics.

The nub of Carroll’s argument, then, is this: whether the laws are deterministic or probabilistic, they are still laws, and human atoms obey them. There is no room for a self that stands outside the causal order and “makes” the atoms do anything.

III. Jim Al-Khalili’s Physicist’s Perspective

Jim Al-Khalili approaches the question differently but arrives at an equally deflationary place regarding quantum mechanics. In his essay “Do we have free will — a physicist’s perspective?” (drawn from his book Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Science), Al-Khalili affirms that we do have free will. But — and this is crucial — he explicitly denies that quantum mechanics is what rescues it: “it is rescued not by quantum mechanics, as some physicists argue, but by chaos theory. For it doesn’t matter that we live in a deterministic universe in which the future is, in principle, fixed. That future is only knowable if we were able to view the whole of space and time from the outside. But for us, and our consciousnesses, embedded within space-time, that future is never knowable to us. It is that very unpredictability that gives us an open future.”

This is a striking concession. Al-Khalili grants that the universe may be, “in principle, fixed” — that is, deterministic — and locates “freedom” entirely in our inability to predict it. As Jerry Coyne pointed out in a sharp critique, Al-Khalili “mistakes unpredictability for free will.” Unpredictability is an epistemic limitation, a fact about what we can know; it is not an ontological openness, a fact about what is genuinely undetermined. A pseudorandom number generator is unpredictable to one who does not know its seed, yet its output is fully fixed. If Al-Khalili’s universe is truly “in principle fixed,” then his “free will” is a label we paste over our own ignorance — exactly the molecular puppetry the libertarian denies.

IV. The Standard Objection: “Randomness Is Not Control”

Behind both physicists stands a single, genuinely powerful objection — what philosophers call the “luck objection” or the “Mind argument.” It runs: if your decision is determined by prior causes, you did not freely originate it; but if it is undetermined — a quantum coin-flip in the brain — then it is mere chance, and chance is not control. An action that “happens to you out of the blue” is no more yours than an involuntary knee-jerk. Hence free will is incompatible with determinism and with indeterminism alike. Robert Kane calls this the ascent and descent of “Incompatibilism Mountain.” The Information PhilosopherThe Information Philosopher

This is the strongest card in the skeptic’s hand, and an honest refutation must meet it head-on rather than wishing it away. I will argue that it rests on a false dichotomy. The objection assumes that the only two options at the moment of an undetermined physical event are (a) prior physical determination and (b) blind chance. It simply omits a third possibility, which is precisely the one Eddington and his successors propose: a non-physical, conscious selection among genuinely open physical possibilities — a selection that is neither fixed by the antecedent physical state nor random, because it is made by an agent.

V. Arthur Stanley Eddington and the Reopened Door

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944), the Cambridge astrophysicist who led the 1919 eclipse expedition confirming Einstein’s general relativity, was among the first great physicists to grasp the philosophical earthquake of quantum mechanics. A devout Quaker, he delivered the 1927 Gifford Lectures, published in 1928 as The Nature of the Physical World — a book so influential that, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes (citing Andrew Hodges’s biography), the young Alan Turing “drew much between 1928 and 1933 from the work of the mathematical physicist and populariser A. S. Eddington,” and “in an early speculation, influenced by Eddington, Turing had suggested that quantum mechanical physics could yield the basis of free-will.”

Eddington’s central claim is stated with crystalline force in Chapter XIV (“Causation”): “It is a consequence of the advent of the quantum theory that physics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law. Determinism has dropped out altogether in the latest formulations of theoretical physics and it is at least open to doubt whether it will ever be brought back.” And then the decisive sentence: “Meanwhile we may note that science thereby withdraws its moral opposition to free-will.” Roangelo

This is the hinge of the entire debate. For two centuries, the Newtonian clockwork had given materialism a powerful weapon: if every particle’s future is fixed by its past, then volition is an illusion, a subjective gloss on a predetermined trajectory. Eddington’s point is that quantum mechanics removed that weapon. Physics no longer asserts that the future is fixed; therefore physics no longer forbids that the mind should help decide it.

Eddington went further, identifying volition with the selection among physically open alternatives: “If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.” And, pressing the contrast with mere physical causation: “To the question whether I would admit that the cause of the decision of the atom has something in common with the cause of the decision of the brain, I would simply answer that there is no cause. In the case of the brain I have a deeper insight into the decision; this insight exhibits it as volition, i.e. something outside causality.” GoodreadsGoodreads

This is the exact rebuttal to Carroll and Al-Khalili. Eddington does not claim that randomness equals freedom — a charge often leveled at him. He claims that the collapse of determinism creates the logical space in which volition, known to us directly by “insight,” can operate as the selector among open possibilities. Indeterminism is necessary but not sufficient; consciousness supplies the rest.

Eddington’s deeper metaphysics reinforces this. He was a monistic idealist: “The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind… To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” For Eddington, mind is not a late and alien intruder into a material world; as he wrote (pp. 276–81), “no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.” On such a view, the idea that mind should influence matter is not a category error but the natural order of things. OisfYquotes

It must be conceded — for honesty’s sake — that Eddington himself was cautious about the magnitude of the effect. He worried that “the smallest unit of structure in which the physical effects of volition have their origin contains many billions of atoms,” and that such a large system might wash out quantum indeterminacy. And the philosophers of his day mocked him: “What? You think a free electron makes us free?” But the caution concerns the mechanism, not the principle. The principle — that physics no longer vetoes volition — stands. Florida Philosophical Review

VI. The Convergent Allies

Eddington’s intuition has been developed, in the century since, by a succession of serious physicists and philosophers. Their frameworks differ, but they converge on the rejection of the materialist dichotomy.

(a) The Conway–Kochen Free Will Theorem. In 2006 the Princeton mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen proved a remarkable result, strengthened in 2009 as “The Strong Free Will Theorem.” Their original 2006 Foundations of Physics paper opened by asking: “Do we really have free will, or, as a few determined folk maintain, is it all an illusion?” The theorem states, on three axioms (SPIN, TWIN, and FIN — later weakened to MIN): if experimenters have a free choice of what to measure (a choice “not a function of the past”), then elementary particles must also exhibit a response “not a function of the past.” As they put it in the 2009 Notices of the AMS: “It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity.” Crucially for our argument, the theorem explicitly excludes blind randomness as an explanation: a stochastic, pre-recorded table of random outcomes would violate it. The particle’s response is, in their technical sense, “free” — neither determined nor merely random. This is precisely the third category the luck objection ignores. (Honesty requires noting that critics such as Sheldon Goldstein and colleagues argue the theorem really concerns the incompatibility of deterministic hidden-variable models with relativity, not human free will directly.) Wikipedia

(b) Henry Stapp — treated in his own dedicated section below.

(c) QBism (Quantum Bayesianism). Developed by Christopher Fuchs with Carlton Caves and Rüdiger Schack, QBism holds that the quantum state is not an objective feature of the world but an agent’s personal degree of belief about the outcomes of his own actions. Reality, on this “participatory realism,” is co-created by the agent’s choices: quantum mechanics “is about actions that participate in creating reality, rather than observations of a reality that exists independently of the agent.” Fuchs’s colleague Rüdiger Schack made the connection explicit in a 2023 essay in The Conversation titled “‘QBism’: quantum mechanics is not a description of objective reality – it reveals a world of genuine free will,” writing that QBism’s “vision of the world is one in which agents possess genuine freedom and respect each other’s autonomy.” QBism draws explicitly on the radical pluralism of William James, for whom an indeterminate world is the precondition of moral freedom.

(d) David Layzer. The Harvard astrophysicist David Layzer argued, in his cosmological work, that in an expanding universe the rate of expansion outruns the rate of equilibration, so that “as entropy increased, so too did information.” Macroscopic variables function as genuine random variables, and the universe continually generates real novelty rather than merely unfolding a fixed script. Layzer developed an account of “naturalized libertarian free will” in which the openness is built into the cosmological structure itself — answering directly the claim that the early universe predetermined all our acts. As Eddington himself anticipated in 1935, “The expansion of the universe creates new possibilities of distribution faster than the atoms…” ResearchGate

(e) George Ellis. The South African cosmologist George Ellis, co-author with Stephen Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, has spent decades defending “top-down causation”: higher-level entities (minds, plans, social conventions, the value of money) exert real causal power over their lower-level physical constituents. “You cannot understand the mind in bottom-up terms only,” Ellis argues; abstract logic and conscious intentions have “physical outcomes in the real world.” Against the reductionist slogan that “the physical facts fix everything,” Ellis answers flatly: “It’s not true.” PhilPapers + 3

(f) Penrose and Hameroff (Orch-OR). Sir Roger Penrose, the Nobel laureate, and the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed Orchestrated Objective Reduction: consciousness arises from quantum computations in neuronal microtubules, terminated by an “objective reduction” tied to a quantum-gravity threshold. The decisive feature for our purposes is Penrose’s claim that the outcome of objective reduction is “neither totally deterministic nor random, but influenced by a non-computable factor ingrained in fundamental spacetime.” As Hameroff and Penrose argued in their 2012 paper “How quantum brain biology can rescue conscious free will,” Orch-OR “invokes non-computable influences from information embedded in spacetime geometry, potentially avoiding algorithmic determinism.” Once again: a third category beyond determinism and chance. nihRoyal Society Publishing

(g) David Bohm. The pilot-wave theorist David Bohm offered a realist interpretation in which the quantum potential carries “active information” guiding the particle “analogously to the way radar waves guide a ship on autopilot.” In his Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), Bohm proposed that mind and matter are correlated projections from a deeper “implicate order” of “undivided wholeness,” mediated by active information. Bohm thus dissolves the very mind/matter dualism that makes the materialist objection seem so forceful. ResearchGate

VII. The Information Philosopher’s Two-Stage Model

The philosopher and scientist Robert O. Doyle (the “Information Philosopher”) has clarified the logic that Carroll and Al-Khalili miss. The “two-stage model,” which Doyle traces to William James, separates the problem into two steps: first chance, then choice. Indeterminism (chance) generates a range of alternative possibilities; then the will adequately determines the selection among them. As Doyle puts it, “The element of randomness doesn’t make us random. It just gives us possibilities.” James’s own 1884 formulation, in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” used his walk home from a Harvard lecture: both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are “called,” but only one is chosen. Chance proposes; the agent disposes. This two-stage structure shows precisely why the luck objection fails: the randomness is not the locus of the decision; it is merely the supplier of options over which the agent then exercises selection. harvardmagazine

VIII. The Refutation Drawn Together

We may now state the refutation in full. Carroll’s strongest move is to say that even indeterministic laws are still laws, and that to invoke volition is to “violate” them. But this assumes that the quantum laws specify the outcome of an individual measurement. They do not. The Born rule specifies only the probability distribution over an ensemble; it is silent on which outcome occurs in the single case. That silence is not a gap in our knowledge (as it would be in a hidden-variable theory) but, on the orthodox view, a genuine ontological openness. To propose that consciousness selects among the open outcomes is therefore not to violate the Born rule — the long-run statistics can be perfectly preserved — but to fill a space the rule leaves empty. Carroll’s “full stop” is premature.

Al-Khalili’s move fails more simply. He concedes determinism and relabels ignorance as freedom. But if the future is “in principle fixed,” then no relabeling can make us its authors. His chaos-theoretic “free will” is the compatibilist’s consolation prize, not the libertarian freedom that moral responsibility and revelation require.

And the shared objection — randomness is not control — is answered by the entire tradition from Eddington to Stapp: the dichotomy of determinism-or-chance is incomplete. Conway–Kochen’s “free” particles, Penrose’s “non-computable” reductions, and Stapp’s consciousness-driven collapses all occupy the missing third category. Indeterminism is necessary but not sufficient; the agent supplies the sufficiency.

HENRY STAPP: A QUANTUM THEORY OF MIND

Biography. Henry Pierce Stapp was born on March 23, 1928, in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in particle physics at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of two Nobel laureates, Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain. His pedigree in foundational physics is extraordinary. In 1958 he was invited by Wolfgang Pauli to ETH Zurich to work personally on the basic problems of quantum mechanics; when Pauli died that December, Stapp turned to John von Neumann’s Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and composed an essay, “Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics,” whose title he would later give to his 1993 book. In 1969 he was invited by Werner Heisenberg to work at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and in 1976 by John Archibald Wheeler. For decades Stapp was a member of the Theoretical Physics Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he did substantial conventional work on the scattering of polarized protons, parity violation, and the development of axiomatic S-matrix theory, as well as on the nonlocality implications of Bell’s theorem. Wikipedia + 2

His Views. Stapp is the most rigorous modern champion of the thesis that quantum mechanics, in its orthodox (von Neumann) formulation, is “basically a theory of the connection between the minds and the brains of observers.” He builds on the von Neumann–Wigner insight that the collapse of the wavefunction is not accomplished by any physical apparatus but is consummated only when the chain of measurement reaches a conscious observer. Von Neumann, Stapp notes, moved the “Heisenberg cut” all the way up, so that everything physical lies below it, described quantum mechanically, leaving above the cut only “the psychologically described” — what von Neumann called the observer’s “abstract ego.” newdualism + 2

On this orthodox view, the dynamics has two parts. The deterministic Schrödinger evolution generates an ever-spreading “smear” of possibilities. But our experience is not smeared; the pointer is either to the right or not. What resolves the smear into a definite experience is what von Neumann called “Process 1” — the posing of a question to nature, a “probing action.” Stapp’s decisive claim is that this choice of probing action is genuinely free: it is, in his words, “neither determined by, nor even statistically biased by, the totality of the present and past physical realities represented in the theory.” Here, in the orthodox mathematics itself, is the foothold for free will that Carroll declares impossible. newdualismnewdualism

The Quantum Zeno Effect. Stapp’s most original contribution is a concrete mechanism by which mental effort can influence the brain. The “Quantum Zeno Effect” is the well-established quantum phenomenon whereby rapidly repeated observation of a system can “freeze” its evolution — a watched quantum pot does not boil. Stapp proposes that conscious attention, by rapidly and repeatedly posing the same question to the brain (holding a chosen neural template of activity in place), can — through the Quantum Zeno Effect — hold a pattern of brain activity in being longer than it otherwise would persist, thereby biasing which physical action ensues. Mental effort thus becomes physically efficacious without violating the statistical laws of quantum mechanics, because the agent controls the rate and timing of the probing questions, not the probabilities of nature’s answers. Stapp developed this with the neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz and Mario Beauregard in “Quantum theory in neuroscience and psychology: a neurophysical model of mind/brain interaction” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 360(1458): 1309–1327, 2005).

His Books and Influences. Stapp’s major works are Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (1993), Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007), and Quantum Theory and Free Will: How Mental Intentions Translate into Bodily Actions (2017). He draws explicitly on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (proposing a “revised Whiteheadianism”) and on the psychology of William James. In Mindful Universe he insists that “the causal closure of the physical” is “an untenable myth,” and that “our conscious experiences enter into the dynamics in specified ways not fixed by the physically described aspects alone.” Against Carroll’s poetic naturalism, Stapp offers a physics in which mind is not an emergent way of talking but a fundamental and causally potent feature of reality. Wikipedia + 2

Honest Acknowledgment of Criticism. Intellectual integrity requires noting that Stapp’s model is contested. The physicist Danko Georgiev and the philosopher David Bourget have argued that Stapp’s “mind” has no wavefunction or density matrix of its own yet acts on the brain via projection operators, which they say is incompatible with standard quantum mechanics; and Georgiev contends that the Quantum Zeno Effect cannot survive environmental decoherence in the warm, wet brain — invoking a theorem that projection operators cannot decrease von Neumann entropy. Stapp has replied that these allegations of error are themselves mistaken. The debate is unresolved, but it is a debate within physics — which is itself the point: the question of mind and quantum collapse is a live scientific research program, not the closed case Carroll’s “full stop” implies. Wikipedia

EPILOGUE: THE LIGHT THAT BECKONS AHEAD

There is a deep irony in the spectacle of materialist physicists invoking the authority of physics to deny human freedom. For it was physics itself — in its most revolutionary century — that dismantled the clockwork prison the materialists had inherited from Laplace. Eddington saw this in 1928 with the clarity of a man watching a wall come down: science, he said, “withdraws its moral opposition to free-will.” The skeptics of our own day, Carroll and Al-Khalili, have not so much refuted Eddington as declined to walk through the door he opened, preferring the older certainties of a determinism that their own science has rendered optional.

The believer need not fear this debate; he should relish it. The Qur’an addresses humanity as a responsible agent — “Whosoever will, let him believe, and whosoever will, let him disbelieve” (18:29) — and the entire moral architecture of revelation presupposes that this address is not a cruel joke played upon automata. What the new physics offers is not a proof of the soul, but something quieter and more valuable: the removal of the supposed scientific veto against it. The universe, Eddington concluded, is “of the nature of a thought… the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” If he was right, then mind is not a stranger in the cosmos, struggling to wrest free will from indifferent matter; it is, in some sense, the native ground from which the physical world itself is woven. Oisf

We must be honest that the libertarian, consciousness-based interpretation remains a minority view, and that many able physicists and philosophers — Carroll and Al-Khalili among them — reject it. But the burden of proof has shifted. It is no longer the believer in free will who must apologize before the tribunal of physics; it is the determinist who must explain why, in a science that has abandoned determinism, he clings to its moral consequences. Eddington put it best, in words that might serve as the motto of every honest seeker, in the laboratory or in the mosque: “Wherever a way opens we are impelled to seek, conscious that in this activity of mind we are obeying the light that is in our nature.” Oisf