Ah, I especially love it when someone arguing for determinism earnestly tells us that if only we believe, our lives will be the better for it! Such expressions reveal that at heart this person believes in choice and free will. (See my lighthearted Medium blogpost, “How to win an argument with a determinist.”). If the writer honestly believed free will was impossible, then why write a post trying to get others to agree with him?

From a logical point of view, I think the real problem is that determinists want to present causality as a closed system that encompasses all experience. But our silence is an open system, and within. It, every principle is provisionally held, pending more evidence. Determinists rely on an antiquated Newtonian model of the universe. But even in our quantum age, physicists do not have a working Unified Field theory of everything. Our universe is not all billiard balls clacking into one another. There are mysteries we do not yet fathom. One of these is consciousness itself. Consciousness is not satisfactorily explained by science. Not derived from those colliding molecules, unless on believes it so by faith. And consciousness is the repository of free will - which is probably not at all as our great moral philosophers fancy it to be. But also, it is not nothing.

I remember David Hume’s refutation of the phenomenalism of Bishop Berkeley, who believed there was no physical reality and everything was an idea. Hume kicked a stone and said, “I refute Berkeley thus!” You, dear reader, chose to read this far. You will chose to comment, clap, or simply move on. It’s all your own conscious choice.