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R.W. Richey's avatar

I'm from a religious tradition that doesn't believe in predestination (we believe in foreordination). Despite this I recently came across the following metaphor about predestination that I really liked:

We're all dogs tied to a wagon. We don't get to decide where we're going, but we can decide whether to get dragged through the dirt by our necks, or whether to trot proudly alongside.

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William H Stoddard's avatar

I have been a determinist since I was in college back around 1970, and I still am. But I think the idea that determinism is incompatible with agency is a misunderstanding.

There's an argument put forth by C.S. Lewis (and also by J.B.S. Haldane, a Leninist whom he argued with, and Nathaniel Branden, a disciple of Ayn Rand): If my beliefs are biochemical states within my brain (or some other physically describable reality), then we cannot suppose that my beliefs are based on apprehension of truth, and thus we cannot say that I believe in determinism because I see that determinism is true; we can only say that I have been determined to have that belief by some chemical process. So all truth claims evaporate in the determinist worldview.

But I think that reflects a confusion. It's not the case that causality is something outside me that somehow compels my brain to do this or that, to believe this or that. It's that causality is an antecedent process that brought my brain into being, as a system that functions in a certain way. It's not that the biochemical processes CAUSE my beliefs; rather, they CONSTITUTE my beliefs. (It's not surprising that Lewis seems to be working with a dualist model of human beings; it's much more of a surprise with Haldane, and even with Branden, a disciple of Ayn Rand, who denounced the dualist view of man.)

Causal processes, for example, give rise to the connections within a honeybee's brain and sense organs, through which it recognizes flowers, traces the path back to the hive, and dances to inform other bees of where the flowers are. But that doesn't mean that the causal processes arbitrarily reached in and MADE the bee dance in a certain way that has nothing to do with the flowers or the flight. The causal processes operating within the bee are so configured that the bee acts in a way that reflects the realities around it; they constitute the bee's perceiving, learning, and communicating. The fact that those processes exist doesn't invalidate the bee's actions.

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