Well evolution is the development of life, and all life is is replicating molecules. You arrange molecules in certain ways and you get different forms of life. The molecules in turn developed, and we can trace this back to the Big Bang, so it was "something". This small something developed using the laws of the universe, and continues to develop today.
I have to admit I've heard some pretty lousy arguments for determinism over the years, the worst of which was presented by YouTuber "gogreen18" who 99.9% of the time is a rational person who argues very well for atheism. Her flawed argument for determinism went something like "my brother doesn't like bananas, and even if I ask him to eat bananas he won't, because it is programmed into him that he doesn't like bananas and therefore won't eat them". This is ridiculous. I don't like bananas either, but I could easily go downstairs and eat one if I wanted to.
I also want to bring in science to the conversation, because currently science states that true randomness does occur in nature. Indeterminism in science is as accepted as gravity, and determinism is all but dead. This might not relate to free will of course, but the fact remains that determinism is only a philosophy because it assumed that every action in the universe had an effect, and those effects caused other effects, etc, etc. If the universe operated like this, then you could simply rewind and play it all again and have the exact same result. Since this isn't the case (at least not according to science) then indeterminism related to free will is still on the table.
I agree though, that the problem with the whole argument is that a deterministic universe looks exactly the same as an indeterministic one. The only way to know for sure is to travel back in time and observe the universe from outside the universe (so as not to have any affect on the state of the past universe). This is impossible of course
I have to admit I've heard some pretty lousy arguments for determinism over the years, the worst of which was presented by YouTuber "gogreen18" who 99.9% of the time is a rational person who argues very well for atheism. Her flawed argument for determinism went something like "my brother doesn't like bananas, and even if I ask him to eat bananas he won't, because it is programmed into him that he doesn't like bananas and therefore won't eat them". This is ridiculous. I don't like bananas either, but I could easily go downstairs and eat one if I wanted to.
I also want to bring in science to the conversation, because currently science states that true randomness does occur in nature. Indeterminism in science is as accepted as gravity, and determinism is all but dead. This might not relate to free will of course, but the fact remains that determinism is only a philosophy because it assumed that every action in the universe had an effect, and those effects caused other effects, etc, etc. If the universe operated like this, then you could simply rewind and play it all again and have the exact same result. Since this isn't the case (at least not according to science) then indeterminism related to free will is still on the table.
I agree though, that the problem with the whole argument is that a deterministic universe looks exactly the same as an indeterministic one. The only way to know for sure is to travel back in time and observe the universe from outside the universe (so as not to have any affect on the state of the past universe). This is impossible of course
