Week 9: Determinism

How would you feel going through your whole life, the ups the downs, the good the bad and everything else in between, if you were confronted with the hard cold fact that every choice in thought, word, or deed, you believed you made, was not a choice you made but was the result of some psychological, sociological, psychological, or theological pre-determined cause?  How would it feel to know from here on out, neither you, me or anyone else really existed; that the “I” was an illusion created by organic and chemical reactions to chaotic natural causes or simply robotic creatures programmed by some power that reeks disaster or pleasure for reasons we can never know?

This is what is at stake in the debate over freedom and determinism.  If hard determinism is true nothing matters. If hard determinism is true it does not matter what or who is the cause because we have no control over the cause or the effect and we have no way of knowing if our perception of reality is determined.  Determinism jeopardizes the following:

• Self-Knowledge
• Knowledge of others
• Moral Knowledge
• Scientific knowledge
• Justice
• truth

Determinism destroys our ability to have a coherent theory of knowledge (epistemology) because we can never know if what we are experiencing is true because it has been determined.  The leads to gross relativism.  I can never know the real me because there is no real me, just a biological or even spiritually programmed robot who thinks and acts as he/she has been programmed.  

I can never know others because my perceptions have been determined and since the other person has been determined there is no other person to know.

Moral knowledge is lost because we can only do what we have been determined to do and know what we have been determined to know regardless of the truth.  Without choice moral accountability is impossible, of course, unless we have been programmed to be ridiculous. There would be no moral difference between Jesus and Hitler because neither had any say in who they were.

Science is obsolete.  This is ironic since some have used science to promote determinism.  How can scientists know anything if everything they think they know was caused by some force outside of themselves.  If everything is determined, including scientific reasoning, perceptions, theories, and experiments how do we know they are valid since we have no choice but to come to those conclusions?

The law courts become invalid because people can't be judged for choices they did not make.  If I steal it is because that is what I was programmed to do; if I cheat on my taxes or steal from my boss it is because I am programmed to take from others.  There are no just wars or causes only pre-determined acts of violence.  There is no love only programmed desire.  There is no forgiveness because there is no wrong or immoral choices made because there are no choices only cause and effect.

Determinism negates truth because we can never really know anything.  If determinism is true we can never know if determinism is or isn't a reality because we can only perceive what has been caused to be perceived and we can only discover what has been caused to be discovered.

There are aspects of life that are determined. If we do not eat we will die. We cannot choose our biological parents.  Humans cannot be any other species, such as, a dog or a goat.  However this determinism is related to our nature.  We are limited by our nature and to some degree determined by it.  This is not a hard deterministic position. Example: fire will burn your hand if you put it over the flame of the stove, but that does not mean your hand was determined to be burned.  It is the nature of fire to consume or to burn.