Ethicists and evolutionists alike have asked whether the intellectual acceptance of human evolution requires us to give up the common assumption that we are responsible for our acts. Morality itself would be fatally compromised if science somehow demonstrated that human freedom and moral responsibility were illusions. For all their disagreements, many evolutionists and Christians concur that we must make a choice between two irreconcilable and mutually exclusive alternatives: either “free will” or evolution. This chapter, on the contrary, argues against this false dichotomy.

The chapter is structured in three steps. First, I will examine critically some of the literature on the “free will and determinism” question produced by various evolutionists, most of whom assume some kind of a reductive fatalism. I argue here that the epistemologically and ontologically reductionistic views of some evolutionists cannot explain away the experience of free choice or demonstrate that it is illusory. Human freedom in its most important senses escapes the purview of science. Sociobiology fails to account for our first-person experience of human action, the starting point for reflection of our capacity for free choice as moral agents. We all have abundant evidence from our own lives of being able to do one thing rather than another and acting on the basis of what we judge to be good reasons. Sociobiology fails in its attempt to explain away this experience as illusory.