Free will and Ise (Action) in Yoruba Philo-Religio-Cultural Thought: An Ethical Appraisal

This paper focuses on the traditional free will discussion with little attention paid to the influence of neuroscience on human free will within the Yoruba Religio-cultural contexts. This study aims to logically examine the implications of the findings of neuroscience on free will in the context of the Yoruba religion, a religion closely related to the culture of the people. Revelations from neuroscience have led to claims that free will is an illusion, a position that threatens human responsibility. There are obvious religious implications for sustaining this claim. This paper seeks to reconcile the position of neuroscience with its implications in the Yoruba religious contexts. The discovery in the field of neuroscience indicate that human decisions for actions are initiated before we are aware of them, thereby suggesting that free will is an illusion and also reconstructing the traditional free will debate. This reconstruction seeks to reaffirm beliefs centred on responsibility which itself is an important element in most world religions and cultures. Serious implications arise for the sustenance of this belief in relation to neuroscience and free will. If indeed we are not free, then our actions are beyond our control. However, we cannot discard the discovery of neuroscience because it is based on empirical proofs and on the other hand, we cannot deny the obvious implications its sustenance would generate especially within the Yoruba religiocultural contexts. This paper employed the historical and analytical method to elucidate the key 
insights in this work.