Determinism

[Caecilian]

That's remarkably close to it considering you're just beginning the journey.

Some devils of the details:
1. - Determinism is not a scientific theory but a philosophical viewpoint. The difference is that determinism is not a body of scientifically coherent verifiable statements used to explain existing facts and predict new ones. Moreover determinism is a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality.
2. - Fortunately science gives us lots of verified theories with which we can predict quite a bit with good accuracy and understand historic facts.
3. - If determinism is true for the reality we live in it follows that contracausal freewill cannot exist. Since contracausal freewill is a concept that religious concepts as the soul depend on, it follows that determinism refutes religious concepts that are dependent on that.

---

Numbering added

Yeah, mem has done well. Sadly, I'm going to have to disagree with some of the above and no doubt muddy the waters again. Sorry mem.

1 and 2 are fine. 3 is problematic.

The issue for religious types isn't contracausal free will per se. Its the viability of libertarian free will, which is rather different.

Libertarian free will is the position that our conscious decisions (i) don't reduce ontologically to physical events, (ii) are causally efficacious and (iii) are somehow self-caused. Pretty clearly, libertarian free will requires an immaterial mind/ soul. I'm not sure that the reverse is true, though- which is what you appear to be saying. Since dualists need immaterial -> material causation for immaterial minds to affect the physical world, I'd assume that they also believe in immaterial -> immaterial causation. Which could be deterministic, I suppose (its all incoherent anyway, so why not?).

As I've said, the libertarian position requires that immaterial minds are somehow self-causing, or maybe not caused at all. This means that indeterminism is just as bad as determinism for the libertarian position. Mental states being the result of stochastic micro-phenomena is every bit as fatal to libertarianism as their being caused by deterministic micro-phenomena.

So why is libertarian free will so important to the christians? Not, I would say, because they need it for the soul to work. As noted above, for the soul to work you need immaterial causation (which is bad enough), but not immaterial self-causation, a concept that manages to be incoherent on two seperate counts (that takes doing). No- what they need libertarian free will for is the problem of evil.

The 'problem of evil' can be summed up like this: 'If god is so fucking benevolent, then why Auschwitz?'

The standard christian reply is: 'God gave Man free will. So he ain't responsible'.

This only works if the free will that god gave man is libertarian free will. If you don't accept libertarian free will then you get an uninterrupted chain of events that goes from god's creation to Auschwitz. The chain could be deterministic; it could be stochastic. It doesn't really matter. God gets the responsibility.