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God acting through us does not destroy the "unity" of the "self"; it is what unifies the self in the first place. The scientist's comment reveals an either/or mentality about selves in general—that the individual human self and the possibility of interaction with a greater self are mutually exclusive, that divine intervention sabotages free will. In fact, it seems to me that people recognize (deep down, though many wouldn't say so) that divine intervention merely sabotages our ideas of free will and wisdom.
Horgan: To me, choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. Moreover, our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society.
ACZ: This is utilitarian, and the author doesn't seem to care if his view is true or not. Moreover, the statement, "Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society," is incredibly culturally biased. Tell that to a Chinese person who believes that his whole life is governed by "joss." Guess his society inherently stinks. Plus, we never see a justification for why we need to 'take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God.'
PJ: Metaphysics is the study of the nature and structure of reality. There can be no "metaphysical justification" for anything that doesn't really exist. If ethics and morality don't exist, and free will and accountability don't exist, then justice of any sort doesn't exist either. This is exactly what moral relativism asserts. If human courts are the highest form of authority in the universe, then morality and justice are reduced to mere power—either power of the government or the power of majority. Right and wrong are merely matters of opinion. Mother Teresa and Hitler merely had differences of opinion regarding human life. There is no way we can say that one was more "right" than the other because no objective standard exists regarding morality.
Horgan: Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a "God of the gaps," who dwells within those shadowy realms into which science has not fully penetrated, such as the imaginary time before the Big Bang banged. In the same way, maybe we can have a free will of the gaps. No science is more riddled with gaps, after all, than the science of human consciousness.
ACZ: 'God of the gaps' is a term pejoratively used to describe the God that some theologians allow to be pushed out of all interaction with creation (or perhaps was wrongly put into some areas of interaction, and then was justly removed.) Basically, the author is claiming that in our epistemic doubt, we can believe in free will, but really, we don't have it.
SVH: I think that the experimental "gap" could be the gap between intuition (or primal action or Kantian basic thought or whatever) and our ability to translate that intuition into action. Language is not quite as quick as thought, and sometimes in order to think things that require words, it takes us longer than our intuition to think them. Make sense?
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