Determinism

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The belief that everything is pre-ordained, either by a higher being or by the universe itself. The standard philosophical argument against a deterministic universe relies on assuming that determinism is true. If this is the case, then it is not possible for us to act in a way consistent with a strong belief of determinism, the 'illusion' of FreeWill being too strong to break. Therefore, it is arguable that FreeWill must exist, since we are incapable of conceiving otherwise, or at the very least, this renders the issue largely irrelevent. This is not a terribly convincing argument really, but it's about the best philosophers seem to have been able to do in a few thousand years of grappling with the problem.

Incidentally, it can also be argued that the belief in an omniscient God implies a deterministic universe, since an omniscient God knows what you are going to do for the rest of your life, this being inherent in the definition of omniscience. And if God knows the one path of your life, in what sense can you have been said to choose that path, since there is no other possible path you could have taken. This argument is flawed in that knowledge does not imply control. For example, one could know that a bus will eventually arrive at a bus stop (because you can see it at the bottom of the road, say), but that does not mean that one will have caused it to happen, since the bus is in fact in Control? of the driver. (Causation?,Compulsion?).

Of course, the how we know that the bus will eventually arrive is the subject of another interesting philosophical point - the contrast between InductiveReasoning and DeductiveReasoning?, in particular Determinism relies upon InductiveReasoning in the creation of its theory, and assumes that the corresponding DeductiveReasoning? models processes in the proposed deterministic universe.

(In Cambridge, we don't know that the bus will eventually arrive).