Determinism is much deeper than accidentalism. Its an extraordinarily common idea, even in Antiquity. Antiquity is the time of ancient Greece and Rome with thinkers like Plato, Socrates, Epicurus, Aristotle and Diogenes. This is a tremendously important time in the lifespan of philosophy but thats not the focus of this episode.
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy states that determinism is, “The doctrine that every event has a cause. The usual explanation of this is that for every event, there is some antecedent state, related in such a way that it would break a law of nature for this antecedent to exist yet the event not to happen”.
Now what does this mean? Essentially, determinism argues that A causes B and B causes C. If I punch someone, I will go to jail. When I’m in jail I will be bored. The second part says if an event, or causation happened and it didn’t have an effect it would break a law of nature. If I let go of a rock it will fall, if not then it breaks a causal law of nature.
Now there is much more information about determinism than there is about accidentalism so if this episode is longer its not because I am more interested in determinism or that I am endorsing determinism I could just find much more.
There are several ideas based on determinism or cause and effect. The first I want to highlight is Aristotle’s idea of causality, which he explained in his book Physics 2 and Metaphysics 5. In Posterior Analytics Aristotle claimed that we could never understand something until we knew its causes. This heavily supports the idea of determinism in the way that it points that we can understand an event by looking at what causes it and we can trace this back but in Aristotle’s idea of causality he isn’t trying to address this progression of causes. We run into an issue with trying to follow causes all the way back, this understanding of the causes going backwards is called infinite regression and there are difficult answers to it.
If we try to look at the cause of Z then Y then X then W and go all the way back to A the question arises what comes before A. In real life, this could be applied to your birth going to your parents and grandparents all the way to the first human and then the chain of evolution all the way back to primordial soup of DNA and RNA that created the first organism and then Earth and the universe we have to ask what came before the universe? Some people say God which Thomas Aquinas argues for in his Teleological arguments which we will talk about eventually. But some people ask what comes before God?
This is strayed very far from the point but that’s a little bit extra history and philosophical thought for you to chew on. Let’s return to Aristotle and his four causes which I will out shortly but it is important to use an example for the causes because otherwise its a little abstract so to steal from one of my professors I’m going to use a cat.
The first cause is the Material Cause, Real simple here, what causes something is what it is made of, so in the case of the cat, the cats material cause is the flesh and blood and bones. A lot of examples talk about a bronze jug and in that context the material cause is bronze.
The second cause is the Formal Cause, which is just the shape of something, so for the cat its how fat it is or how stubby its face is maybe even the color. This Formal Cause claims you can understand the cause of something because of the shape it holds.
The third cause is the Efficient Cause which is what makes the thing or creates the object. So for the cat it would be the momma cat and the papa cat, for the bronze jug it would be the artisan who created it.
The last cause is ironically called the Final Cause and this one is a little more difficult to explain so using a cat may not be helpful. The Final Cause is the purpose of something. A chair is made to sit and a cup was created with the intention to drink from it. Something exists because of its final cause.
This is just one account of causes which is the core of determinism. Another we could use comes from the Bible which we use a lot, believe it or not I am in now way religious but there is value in the example and I plan on using it. The bible attempts to solidify God as the cause, the Alpha and Omega.
In John 1:1 and 1:2 ESV it says, “1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God.” In the context, its referring to Jesus Christ but in Christian faith, Jesus is God because God is a trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But recognize how it says the word was God and it claims that in the beginning was the word therefore God was in the beginning. The bible is full of these claims of God being the eternal cause and I could go on forever but thats not good listening.
This just goes to show that people have been aware of the importance of cause and effect and possibly determinism and the necessity of a cause for a very long time, to be fair its not a very abstract concept, my dog knows if he sits he gets a treat and if I don’t give him a treat he gets upset as if I have violated a law of nature.
So now that we have a level of understanding of determinism we can critique it.
The first critique I will bring up comes from a book called Ethics by William K. Frankena, I was slogging through this book separately from my research for this episode but it ended up having a solid critique of determinism that the author eventually dismissed in a very unconvincing way.
The actual text is horrendously wordy and annoying to read and probably even worse to listen to so I am going to paraphrase. The argument basically points out that if all events are determined by the events that happen before them then people don’t actually have the opportunity to be ethical or unethical. If somebody kills someone there is an event that leads that person to kill their victim. On the other hand there is no reason to praise someone for being nice or kind because there was an event forcing them to be kind. If free will exists determinism is contrary to it.
The other critique I will put forth is from Greg Boyd, in his blog post on ReKnew. In his post he presents three arguments against determinism as contrary to free will. The first argument is similar to the one above and the second claims that the theory is self-refuting but the third is interesting. Boyd claims that by having the ability to deliberate and choose between writing something due at the end of the week or finish a book he is interested in. By being able to choose, Boyd argues he has free will.
There is an excellent, semantic argument against Boyd’s last argument that I hope you can figure out. If you can’t, thats okay! You can ask me @simplephilo on twitter or even email me at simplephilosophy430@gmail.com. Thats all I have for this episode so I will leave you all with the chance to parse out an argument against Boyd.
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Simple Philosophy 