by Louise Rusling

Created on: July 21, 2007   Last Updated: July 22, 2007

The determinism argument that we are not free to make our own choices has been supported by varying degrees of determinism. The deterministic view is that every event has a cause. For example if you had a choice between having jam or marmite on toast and you decide that you want the marmite, then the determinist would argue that you were always going to choose the marmite, you just didn't know it. The reason why you picked the marmite would have been because of something that had happened previously, such as you haven't had marmite for ages or your taste buds find marmite more appetising than jam. Whatever the decision, the determinist will always find a reason or a previous cause for your decision. It is worth mentioning here that determinism is very different from fatalism because the two are often confused. Fatalism argues that things are bound to happen no matter what your do, whereas determinism argues that things happen because of what we do. Either way both arguments clearly state that we are not free to make our own choices.

The deterministic concept was heavily supported after the 17th century when new forms of sciences were being developed. One example was the physics of Newton, which provides us with deterministic laws that appear to describe the motion of all objects in the universe. However, this causal determinism has lessened mainly because of modern quantum physics. This is because the motions of small sub-atomic particles lack determining causes and they are more unpredictable then we initially thought. Prior to the quantum physics revelation it was a mathematician and philosopher named Pierre Simon de Laplace who believed that all human actions are pre-determined. This was because he believed that the universe was an all-encompassing system and things very rarely come about independently. An integral part of Laplace's argument was that of ignorance'. Human beings who thought that they were free to make their own choices were only ignorant' of hidden causes. It could be argued that it is possible to find some form of previous cause, no matter how tenuous, when thinking about our everyday decisions. Basically, if you look and think hard enough about your everyday actions then you can always find a previous reason why it had occurred.

There have been other domains of science that have provided evidence for the deterministic argument. On the whole it looks at the world we live in and considers a whole range of experiences that could explain the

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