Do we have a choice in our actions? Or are we fully subject to laws of nature or the eternal decrees of God as to have no choice in what we do or act? This is a question we will handle, while leaving room for freedom of action and demonstrating the incoherence of deterministic views of reality and our personal agency.
Of course I am not denying that there are aspects of experience that do influence our actions and that some circumstances limit the options which we can choose at any moment, but I will argue against the reductive tendency that collapses all actions to determined effects from determined causations, and my view can be summarized as such: that we are restricted in some aspects of choice due to circumstances and dispositions and also by nature but we can always choose by our will to even act against these or even not act at all, and this will itself does not emanate from those constraints or from the dispositions we have themselves but rather it is a propriety of the human nature itself which constitutes the consciousness and mind of the particular with its mode of operation being a function of physicality and it is that which makes us as agents orient ourselves in the world, as a compass would.
The Epistemological Argument Against Determinism
On the epistemological side of things if we grant that we are fully externally compelled to perform any action, including the ones involving knowledge then it seems that our knowledge is also externally determined leaving no room for a genuine inquiry of truth then any argument for or against free-will holds no rational weight since its expositor was pre-determined to make the argument and I was determined also to reject it. And even if one comes with a distinction between the formation of the belief and its justification both would be priorly determined and all we are doing is performing in a theater play, although I recognize that regrettably some would agree with this conclusion, and well I guess they must have been pre-determined to believe that then. But notice that rational inquiry and genuine debate pre-supposes free-will and that the determinist implicitly by their own action see that free-will exist but argue against it.
And thus we see that if determinism is to be taken to its logical conclusion and who holds it dearly ensures that he is consistent then, the concepts of truth, justification, belief, debate, rationality all go out of the window and lose all meaning and if this is so then I am just throwing words together on a paper and you are just reading incoherent drawings.
Two Types of Determinism
There are two ways determinists come to their view which correspond to two kinds of determinists: one who holds determinism on theological ground and one on natural ground. I will deal later with the theological side which usually either combines the omniscience and omnipotence of God to argue that he is sovereign over all actions and that there is no room for free-will or makes the argument that omniscience directly entails the pre-destination of all actions by the infallibility of the knowledge of God.
Natural Determinism and Post-Hoc Explanations
But as for the natural aspect of the position I presented already the self-refuting nature of determinism which also works for the theological aspect, and I will add that the error that determinists commit is that they rely on post-hoc explanations of what is the manifestation of human will, and especially for sociological, psychological and historical explanations, they are not prior to the imminent human experience or the causes of the patterns of human experience, rather that the human, or the human society becomes the object of study of these fields and then the conclusions are made based on the particularity of the free choices and the patterns that arise from those choices of those societies, individuals or civilizations. But the issue is that given the conclusions of those realms of inquiry the determinist projects them either on the past or present or future as to say that it couldn’t have been any other way due to the theories formulated by those studies. On a side-note this error is manifest in Marxist and Hegelian [a]historical analysis methods which is interesting to elaborate upon but we will be going off on a large tangent.
Theological Determinism and Divine Foreknowledge
As for the theological aspect of the position, we will try to see where the issue is with applying foreknowledge of God to matters of agency, especially since God’s knowledge is infallible.
I argue that even if someone is conscious of every decision you will take, he does not by virtue of that pre-determine you to them, but rather in any case it is you who wills to do what he knows already. The dilemma is only a post-hoc issue because it makes it look as if it was not free-will only after it has been freely willed, and also we do not live in hypotheticals, so that what ifs do not apply and I will explain as such: choices exist before they were chosen, and they cease to do after one of the choices is willed to be chosen as we are unable to replicate alternate choices with the exact same circumstances. And when the determinist says that I had no choice after I made the choice he is right because I already made the choice and it became an actual state of affairs but if he told me this before I chose anything he would be wrong since not only did I not choose yet but also because I can choose otherwise, and now given that some will say either way God would know and I cannot make a choice that God wouldn’t know beforehand I would that the foreknower is not in time, he would see all the actualities of the willed choices without explicitly willing them unless he chooses to and that his foreknowledge then is not temporal and we cannot argue from an external perspective even of people let alone that of the transcendent which is an eternal present which encompasses all possibilities and this might present paradoxes but it is bound to happen when the finite tries to comprehend the infinite.
The Nature of Choice and Actualization
What do I mean exactly by saying that other choices cease to exist after one choice is made? I mean that the event that could have happened by a different choice ceases to be actualizable by my own will, as an example let us think of a simple choice, let us say that I woke up and chose to drink coffee instead of tea for breakfast on a morning Thursday on the 10th day of July year 2025, what happened here is that the choice of having the tea for breakfast in that specific time in those specific circumstances are no longer actualizable in any way possible and that I will continue to live in a future where that possibility is discarded. And after I made that choice the determinist co-worker in the office while I am having a friendly conversation with will tell me I had no choice but to drink the coffee this morning because everything is determined while I could have easily when I woke up chosen to rather change it up and drink tea instead. The problem is that the determinist thinks of it as pre-determined but it was rather post-determined choice that was projected unto the past and also that whatever causal argument one might use for determinism does not entail that the agent will activate his will towards that logical conclusion of that chain necessarily but it is that the agent can freely will for or against or for nothing or for even something else entirely.
And to bring back the argument for determinism from divine foreknowledge, I would elaborate that we cannot fully comprehend the position of the foreknower that is outside of time and space and the determinist tries to argue from that point of view which is inapplicable and does not give us an accurate view of how we experience time and through this the determinist ends up even misunderstanding how the foreknower knows by projecting the way we predict the future on him but with perfect accuracy.
A Note on Compatibilism
There are also some who stand for a compatibilist view, a view that hinges on redefining free-will in order to make cohere with a view of determinism which makes them determinist as well but with an added ad-hoc revision of what free-will means which often do not correspond to what we experience truly, though the position is more complex, I would postpone arguing against for later.