Then Again, Maybe Determinism is Why I Wrote This Article and I Am Wrong Thinking I Freely Willed to Do So

A few days ago over at the Groping the Elephant blog, Doug B brought up the subject of predictability, specifically of causal determinism. I get the impression from this and other of his previous posts that Doug is a dead set acceptor of determinism (as far as I can tell).

Anyway, so he ended the post inviting his readers to think about that. And I accepted the invitation, since although I knew where I stood on the subject, I really had never thought out the reasons why and figured I probably should.

Determinism is the philosophy that every event, including human decision and action, is absolutely predetermined and the result of earlier causes. The presumption here is that there is no such thing as free will or choice, that events which seem happenstance are actually foreordained and could be fully understood and explained (the future could be predicted even) if only an avant-garde smartest someone was able to figure out how things work.

Of course I have no issue with believing in the laws of nature, causes and effects, antecedent conditions producing consequences, butterflies spawning tornadoes; physics is physics, after all, and I'm no fantastical flake.

The problem I have holding with determinism is that, precluding free will, there is no such thing as morality, no right or wrong, no good or evil; all of our behaviors would be foreordained and we would have no choice in the decisions that we make. Everything would be out of our control, which might certainly be convenient but which I find incredible.

Assuming that there is no chance happening, no such thing as choice and only a singular predictable future reality seems entirely illogical to me. I would maintain that, in the mashup of all things existential, chance and free will are also causative in determining the future, just as are other natural laws.

My personal contention then, is that there is an interconnection of certainty with chance and choice that shapes reality, and that there are multiple possible futures. Fundamentally, I think that the physical and metaphysical realities of a connected universe frustrates being defined by either absolute determinism or chance, that the two are in fact compatible.