About People Being Special and Thinking As Just Another Chemical Reaction

There is something so weird about listening to a bunch of university professors, active and retired, who have chosen to fly in from all over the country if not all over the world to attend a meeting  they've chosen to attend so they can assert that consciousness and free will are illusions.   It is especially funny when one of the great points they assert supports that is that people are no different from other animals, though I wonder why plants and members of other kingdoms are not included.  If consciousness and free will are the mere products of molecular actions then what makes what people do different from what coleus plants or viruses do?  I'd think it rather animalist to pretend that the chemical reactions in our brains are any different from the chemical reactions in plants that have far more observable effects.

And it's so funny to hear these great thinkers saying that what they're doing is no different from what animals do, when they have heard nothing of the POV of any species of animal on the topics that were chosen for the discussion from the people who chose to call the meeting and chose the cosy Inn in Western Massachusetts to hold the meeting  in.   I would imagine that they would chuckle and scoff at the passage in 2nd Timothy 1:9

He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.

But what's the difference between that and what they believe about their own meeting?  I'd guess their gathering and meeting, the topics, the order of speaking, the things they said and even the words they would say them in would have been determined from the first conceivable moment of the Big Bang (that is until that cosmological idea is set aside for the next big thing).   But, then, so would some meeting of the Foot Washing Baptists in which they discussed that passage, only in the KJV, just as ordained by the same physical forces from the beginning of time. If all of what we do is predetermined, why is it wrong for the Baptists to do what comes Naturalistically any more than it does for the "Naturalists" do do what they are compelled by physics and chemistry to do.   It puts me in mind of something I once heard on a You Tube:


I've been to a skeptics convention and an exorcism and the exorcism was way more fun. 
John Safran

Listening to the "Moving Naturalism" sessions to report on them is painful.  I think I'm going to go look for a Santeria practitioner for relief.