Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vat, the host and the content director here at Word on FireCatholic Ministries joining us as he does almost every week is the great Bishop Robert Barron, Bishop Barron. Good to talk with you.

Hey Brandon, good to see you as always.

I missed getting to see you in person about a week or two ago. We for the very first time in our history gathered everyone from Word on Fire. I think about 25 people.

They all came to Santa Barbara. I had to miss it because I was at home protecting my family from Hurricane Dorian. But tell us about this Word on Fire retreat. I must have been a joy for you to get everybody together for the first time.

It was just one of the highlights of the last couple of years for me to see everybody because we're all over the country as you know. I mean you're across the country and we have folks in New York and Washington and of course Chicago, Dallas all over the place.

And so to have everybody here was a joy. We had a marvelous picture taken right on the back porch here at the house. And I really treasure that.

I really felt you know a bit of my spiritual fatherhood.

Priests aren't fathers in the biological order, you know, as you are. But we're priests in the spiritual order. And for me, that's where the generativity of my priesthood.

I really sense it is with the Word on Fire family. And just to see those, you know, wonderful, mostly younger people.

We had a full of enthusiasm for the gospel, a full of life, full of purpose, and how smart they are and prayerful they are. We had a retreat day. I spoke to them. We had mass. I spoke to them. Father Steve spoke.

And just a lot of fellowship and wonderful experience. We missed you though, of course, Brandon. That was everyone did. And it was just too bad that Darin Hurricane.

You reflected afterward on the mysterious workings of Providence and how it gathered all of these various people from across North America to be a part of this Word on Fire movement. Say a little something about that.

I'm always amazed at it. You know, it's one of those theological ideas that can sound very abstract. But I think that's really where the rubber meets the road when it comes to theology, meeting life. Because now you see that God is in all things. Thomas says by essence, presence and power.

But see, God is never present in personally. God's always present with mind and will and purpose. Right. And so God's omnipresence looks like Providence. It looks like God's always about something. He's, he's affecting something, making something happen.

And so I see it with Word on Fire in just a thousand different ways of how certain people have come to us and then connections made and relationships grown and all these wonderful things. It's the Lord, you know, doing his work.

Planning something in my mind in hard a long time ago when I was just, you know, on my own thinking, well, maybe we should do something more with, you know, we didn't call it social media in those days. We just called it, I don't know what radio and TV.

But then how it's grown and that's, I think, a sign of God's providence.

Well, today we're going to talk about the perennial interesting topic of free will. People have been discussing it, of course, for centuries, but just this week in the Atlantic, there was a very interesting article titled a famous argument against free will has been debunked. Now I won't get into all the details, but it's referencing this famous experiment by a neuroscientist or physiologist named Benjamin LeBette in the 1980s.

And essentially he wired people up to an EEG machine and he said, whenever you feel like it lift your finger, whenever you feel like it lift your finger and note the time at which you lifted your finger.

And what he found through this experimentation is that the neurons in these subjects, brains started firing several milliseconds before they sensed that they wanted to lift their finger.

So the conclusion of LeBette and many others was that this debunks the idea of free will because it means people's brains are telling them subconsciously to do something even before they choose to do it.

But what this Atlantic article found was that the experiment had many flaws, but recently in 2012, another group of researchers created other experiments that seem to undermine the LeBette thesis.

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