contemporary thought is characterized by a certain schizophrenia. It likes to celebrate modern

science as the paragon of modern rationality and often uses it as an argument to declare

religion, debunked, outdated, irrational and behind the times. At the very same time,

the contemporary mind can defy objectivity and consider reality a mere subjective construct.

It can, in this way, think itself the subject of choices that are almost limitless.

We shape our identities physically as well as by narratives that we tell about ourselves,

and we do so unmoored from anything that could set limits to the validity of the stories that we

tell. Genetics, biology, gender, and even reason, if not the very notion of truth itself,

are considered oppressive if they try to limit our choices.

Increasingly, this ideology of choice clashes with the results of science,

for example, with evolutionary biology, when the latter insists that there are differences between men and women.

But for the most part,

people are willing to allow these thoughts to coexist in their minds by compartmentalizing their worldview. Once we become aware of this contradiction, though, we will see the clashes and

inconsistencies and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the realm of free will.

For here, the very ideology of unlimited choice must claim that we have free will to an almost

unlimited degree, while naturalistic scientism explains to us that neurophysiology and genetics

show such choices to be an illusion.

Now, even those who do not share much of the contemporary mindset will have to ask themselves

what they think about the reality and limits of our freedom. It seems obvious that the truth

must be somewhere in the middle between these extremes.

And as we will see later, this is exactly where we can find St. Thomas Aquinas.

But first, we will ask ourselves how we should think about recent claims from the realm of neuroscience.

...