Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

I don't buy into destiny myself..remember? I'm a determinist not a fatalist. They are vastly different. The position of hard determinism is such that at some point - perhaps long before but perhaps right before the very moment - there was only one way the situation -could- pan out due to the circumstances of the event. That beyond that moment when all requirements where met all roads led to a road rage killing. The point of no return, if you will. Perhaps that moment was only met after the car was doing 50, aimed at the pedestrian, the pedestrian was right in the middle of the path - not fast enough to get out of the way - and beyond the point that the car could slow down quickly enough.

In a deterministic universe, all these events are packaged into the Big Bang. As for destiny-- determinism is just destiny with one possible path.

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Determinism IS falsifiable: if I could produce a real rabbit out of thin hair, IOW, magic, not the art of illusion, but real magic would disprove determinism. In such a world, anything would happen without cause, and hence predicting the future based on scientific laws would be impossible.

EVEN IF you pulled a real rabbit out of thin air, which would be massively surprising, this doesn't prove that things could have turned out otherwise. Maybe due to a wormhole, which traces a causal link back to the Big Bang, Fluffy was inevitably going to materialise at that moment, but nobody predicted it because "we just lack accurate enough data." All it would prove is that some things cannot possibly be predicted-- which is already the case for almost everything in the universe more complicated than billiard balls, taxes or death.