In my paper, I shall first briefly outline the history of Christian scholarship arguing against dualist and in favor of physicalist anthropology, along with even more abbreviated comments on issues in Judaism and Islam. Then I turn to the distinction between reductionist and anti-reductionist forms of physicalism. I claim that reductionism, in general, has been one of the most significant assumptions of the modern worldview; we are only in this generation working out suitable nonreductive understandings of complex phenomena. The developments here involve definitions of downward causation and of emergence, and the development of a new set of concepts for describing complex dynamical systems.
The major focus of the paper will be the most difficult aspect of distinguishing nonreductive from reductive physicalism, that of free will. While I shall not be able to provide here a full treatment of free will, I shall argue, first, that there is no such thing as the free-will problem; it is anachronistic reading of philosophical history to assume that there is a single problem. What many of the individual free-will problems do have in common is the opposition of free will to determinism—of some sort or another. The sort of determinism that is of particular interest to physicalists is neurobiological determinism.
I shall argue, however, that neurobiological determinism is only a worry if neurobiological reductionism is true. The latter decidedly is not true, as I shall attempt to show in the brief time allotted. In making my argument, I shall be aided by reference to points of agreement and contrast between my approach and the approach of Robert Kane in his influential book, The Significance of Free Will.