RE: Determinism Is Self Defeating
July 19, 2013 at 8:08 am
(This post was last modified: July 19, 2013 at 8:15 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(July 19, 2013 at 7:59 am)bennyboy Wrote: In a deterministic universe, all these events are packaged into the Big Bang. As for destiny-- determinism is just destiny with one possible path.Not even close. As the circumstances and participants in events could not have been said to have existed yet - so how could they lead to anything like clockwork? The interactions and results of the first event do not yet constitute a requirement for some action 14 billion years later. You've glossed over all the space in between and in the deterministic model all of the spaces between are crucial. The big bang may be -a part of- the chain of causality - but requirements other than (the big bang occurred) need to be met before any other event we might want to invoke has any measure of certainty attached. For example. The big bang has to have occurred a specific way to produce a force of gravity such that if matter exists with a specific mass and arrangement and proximity to another bit of matter with a specific mass and arrangement then inevitably this force will act on both in a predictable way (that is the only result of all of these exacting circumstances). All requirements must be met.
You're clearly not clear on what determinism is - what seems to have rubbed you the wrong way is fatalism. Fate or destiny has a power arbitrary to any preceding circumstance. Hopefully you can appreciate the immense difference between an invocation of destiny or fate and an invocation of circumstances in attempting to explain an event? To say that one is destined for something since the moment of the big bang is not to state a position of determinism - at all.
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