by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

The philosophy I support is my own, called 'Synergisis', of which nurturant interactivism is a part. Its purpose is to expose how one view of natural phenomena, based on an understanding that all that is extant, can only be compounded from events and processes in a manner that does not at all deny, but only attempts to explain, material existence without adding unknowable external parameters. This requires time to be understood as dimensionally composed of continua of such events interwoven into a myriad of processes; and that those processes, themselves, in the same manner, are interwoven into a myriad of increasingly complex processes. The range of existence covered by this reaches from the simplest, single event and culminates in the overall process to which we have given the proper name, Nature. All that exists is contained within the scope of this culminating process, itself an ongoing event about which we are still learning.

First, let’s set down some working definitions in a manner simplistic enough so that even the most boobulous rube can comprehend them:

Material: that from which stuff is made into things.

Stuff: The material from which things are made into objects. Things are sometimes referred to as ‘stuff’' to signify recognition of this important fact.

Things: Objects made from material.

Space: Anyplace there’s room for more things and stuff.

Time: That which is spent generating more stuff and making more things to fill up space.

Objects: Things you keep running into that occupy space and get in your way. Objects is another name for things. You and I are objects, or at least objectionable.

Choice: Selection(s) made from a range of options.

Events: Any occurrence to range from one point to another in a length of time.

Processes: Events composed of lesser events, in a view of Nature seen as a continuum. Human beings, for an example, are processes in this view, composed of layers of contributive processes built into discrete, unique units which operate within their own continua. Each of those continua compose a unique, self operative unit capable to recognize its material surroundings according to many inputs, including those other continua that are units mainly like itself. This provides the most cogent basis for understanding the interactive nature of our universe.

Free Will: "The mental faculty by which one decides: • judgment
• discernment  • discretion • volition • will • taste • judiciousness
• discrimination." Any argument against free will, it is plain, is nothing more than an argument against accepting responsibility for one's own actions, and amounts to nothing more than a religion-like argument against a statement made in a religious document. As a word, 'freewill' appears 22 times in the NIV Christian Bible, and never is used in any way other than "of their own volition" (nobody told them to). Strong's Bible dictionary defines it as "without coercion", "plentiful", "voluntary". In no place I can find it applied in practice the same as Determinists insist, and like American Heritage, "without constraints". Our will always operates with constraints. Most of us understand that. Apparently some of us don't.

Determinism: a childishly simplistic, arrogant, backward and archaic philosophy, now supplanted by the more accurate concept of interactive Nature, developed to counter the idea of "Free Will" (misnamed: It should have been more like "Originating Will") by misstating the obvious to ridiculous extremes of negativity and by misconstruing the intentions of its original use. American Heritage says:

de·ter·min·ism (d¹-tûr"m…-n¹z"…m) n. The philosophical doctrine that every event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedents that are independent of the human will.

In Oxford American:

de·ter·min·ism (d¹-tûr"m…-n¹z"…m) n A doctrine that human action is not free but determined by motives regarded as external force acting on the will.

Aware that determinism originated in the Christian Calvinist doctrine called "predestination", we must wonder whose motives that refers to, and from whence the "external force" comes to us.

I call it 'archaic' because it assesses modern concepts according to ancient edicts; and simplistic because it denies most of what makes us human in order to build its encapsulated logic. Determinism, as expressed by its adherents, differs from either above definition by denying that human beings possess the attribute called 'will'. I have never discussed determinism with an adherent without eventually being called a "Free Willy". I have described the impossibility of that concept on page one, and shall do so in a different manner later.

Determinism can only work by denial of one’s own humanity, by negating one’s sense of ‘self’, and (in spite of claims to the contrary) one’s sense of self-designated purpose. It does so by defining existence as being only the result of cause and effect and then taking that apparently obvious truism to extreme ends. One of those ends results from defalcation of a wide variety of words into other than their normal usages.

One of the misappropriations of which determinist apologists are found guilty is that of combining ‘choice’ with ‘Free Will’, and insisting some relevancy exists between them. In doing so, negation of Free Will requires also the negation of all that makes us human. Determinists overlook that all their claims are past-oriented, whereas choice is future oriented and relies more on assessments of future needs and anticipated pleasures than on any pressures from the past.

Moreover, arguments against "free will" may only be relevant to a particular interpretation of the Xian Bible. The King James interpretation that reads, "I will love them of my own free will" reads, in the NIV Bible, "I will heal their waywardness and love them freely…." Either way makes it clear that love will be given without restraint.

Arguments supportive of "free will" almost always overlook the limitations inherent to physical existence. ‘Free Will’ is described (in American Heritage) as the power, attributed especially to human beings, of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will. In spite of how it reads, it means we are self-controlled, not controlled by gods, and therefore responsible for our own deeds. To most of us, it seems obvious we have about the same amount of free will as the average animal. Also, to most of us, it seems obvious that we are constrained by external circumstances, whether or not we believe in fate or divinities. Free Will, as something one can possess in some unexplained manner, as a 'thing' or a 'substance' reified into existence, and not as just a characteristic or trait of being human, has aptly enough been discredited many times over, and is seen as an obvious hoax —the result of the early Church playing with biblical concepts to heighten their leverage over their subjects— by at least the more sensible of us.

The Calvinistic hoax that determinists hope to perpetuate, however, is not so easy to counter. Determinism is built upon a backward bromide so obvious it appears acceptable until anyone begins seeking a way to put it to constructive use. By insisting that all to exist be understood only as a breakdown of all things into their component causes and effects, thereby avoiding the discrete processes they all form into or the interactions between all those processes, let alone phenomena that arise from them, and then insisting that it all be separately understood aside from any considerations of how things function as assemblies into units (thus denying their role as causes with any capabilities to achieve a result), determinists portray a very narrow view of humanity’s role in the universe. They do, in fact, deny us, and every other assemblages, any role at all, in spite of our being a natural component of Earth’s environments, by declaring us to be no more than the result of cause and effect relationships that have occurred throughout all time. The choices we perceive ourselves to make, they declare, are only our responses to all that has gone before, and not really choices at all.

Take a good look at that platitude, and try to understand it: We respond to our environment according to what we have been taught, what we have learned from previous experience, and according to our abilities and limitations. It seems almost a cliché to claim that we use what we know and what we can do to choose what seems like the most desirable end from a list of options. That seems obvious, but for the unnecessary negation. Determinists of my experience deny that we choose and insist that we do what we have to, or what looks easiest. They are telling more about themselves than about anyone else! Our wants and needs and hopes and dreams are reduced down to DNA and effects that have been externally caused. Following that to its logical ends leads to the conclusion that we do not exist, that all our perceptions are only illusions determined by cause and effect, an unverifiable conclusion many people have already drawn.

There can be no denying of the role our pasts play to influence our selections from whatever options we perceive to be available. We must deny that is all there is to it, if we are to find any positive use for this fatalistic and negative philosophy. If we can find no constructive use for it, our only option is to abandon it. There is, I will acknowledge, no other choice.

Determinists overlook the vast complexity of Nature, even at our low level within it, to present their philosophy. They overlook human nature the most of all, our curiosity that is always at play, our failures to observe some aspects of our circumstances, while at other times we may perform with superb astuteness. New information arrives in an ongoing cascade of events that we are always testing, testing, testing…. Our knowledge builds while we silently assign priorities to various data in a manner somewhat described by George Lakoff in his little book about ELEPHANT.  Our 'self' builds from that knowledge, and becomes an operative process within the physical being we regard as our own embodiments. That process provides the ongoing sense of analysis we call 'thinking' that contributes the main portion of what we call our 'consciousness' that determinists deny to have existence and influence upon our actions.

Can we argue against their claim? When Nature is seen as interactive events and processes from which new phenomena arise in such a manner that it could never have been predicted, consciousness has as much existence as does anything else: It is a process; that process possesses an ongoing continuum branching through time the same as anything else we can offer a name, describe, and expect other human beings to recognize within themselves. It is recognizable, like much of the rest of existence, through it effects. Determinism's error is to deny that. Denying that renders determinism moot.

In space, large objects influence each other with their gravity, an unseen force within each large body that serves to keep it intact, and acts to attract other bodies to it as a side effect. Gravity could be said to be ‘there’ only as a result of cause and effect in ways we do not yet understand, but we recognize that it arises from material bodies. Gravity can be recognized as a natural process that we have named and learned to describe to other human beings and expect them to recognize by our description.

That is not the same way determinists talk about subjects like ‘self’ and ‘consciousness’, according to which we perceive each other as separate units within separate bodies occupying space according to our mass and the time for which we remain present. Our sense of ‘self’, they claim, results only from our perceptions; our ‘consciousness’, also a result of nothing more than our perceptions, is something we sense only because we think we think. We think we think, but we don’t really think, because they think thinking results only from our perceptions, if we think about it. But, we have to demand, if we can't think, then how can they claim they think that?

Think about it: Thinking must be denied because thinking results in the making of choices, something of which determinists already denied us a capacity to accomplish. You and I think we make choices, according to determinists, but we don’t because we cannot think. We can only respond according to a predetermined conclusion that has been set up as a result of all the cause and effect actions that preceded us in space and in time and that came at us without us having any influence upon them. Thinking, they say, and the perception of ‘consciousness’ and ‘self’, like gravity, must be said to be ‘there’ only as a result of cause and effect in ways we do not yet understand. If we do not say that, determinism fails as a viable philosophy.

Determinism, like the acclaimed God, works in mysterious ways. Descartes would more appropriately, as a Determinist, have claimed, "I think I am because I think I think." He would not have been capable to recognize thinking as a natural process extant and operant within the myriad of processes we can recognize, give names, describe to each other, and recognize when we hear others telling about them.

In practice, determinism must also deny the value of such words as ‘truth’ and ‘facts’. Truth and facts seem to prevail only because of our perceptions. This requires a very narrow definition of those two words that denies their utility, and leaves no room for error. ‘Truth’ must be perfect to be true, and facts must be without exception in order to be true; but, nothing is completely perfect and nothing is without exception, and so nothing is possible to be true. Existence, in the ultimate absurdity, cannot exist.

Since determinism requires that the perception of existence can only be the result of cause and effect actions down through the ages, determinism cannot be true according to its own edicts. In order to adhere to its own dogma, determinism must have exceptions and must contain errors, and must also acknowledge itself to be a result of some humans' perceptions. The most obvious of those errors and exceptions is its failure to recognize the importance of understanding natural processes and the resultant misapprehension of human thought, consciousness, self, and the resultant ability to make choices, an error that seems apparent to the largest numbers of us who live without the negative fatalism that must be adopted before determinism can be accepted as correct.

Determinism overlooks the role of testing within each discrete unit of humanity in its denial of the roles of 'self' and 'consciousness'. We test according to standards we have accepted, but correct those standards as a result of that testing, if we dare, or if the corrections seem important in some way. We process that, each of us, discretely and within our 'selves', and judge according to the apparent value of the various bits in our ongoing stream of data. Determinism sees us as slaves to our genetic makeup, and avoids acknowledgement of recent experiments that prove our minds have the power to influence our own genetic makeup in numerous ways.

Like most religions, determinism represents a backward, impoverishing look at humanity, and for that reason alone it is just plain wrong. Determinism fails because of its negative and detractive stance against humanity. Those things it claims to determine the limitations of each and every aspect of our humanity would be better seen as being what enables us to be human, to recognize our own constructive talents and those of others, to develop ourselves to the limits of our capabilities, and to (while doing so) recognize new things in and around ourselves that can be put to our advantage, to establish goals and recognize whatever potentials are inherent to our total circumstances. To understand why determinism gets viewed by many as a religious doctrine and not science, rewrite any explanation of it by inserting the appropriate form of 'God's will' or 'fate' to match the form of determinism used in the article. You will find that 'God's will' and 'fate' are close synonyms.

What determinism proposes as limits, we commonly recognize as enablements, characteristics that promote our own well-being with aspirations too numerous and complex to outgrow even in a lifetime. What Determinists see as limitations, a wiser philosophy will honor as guides and tools inherent to our natures. Even those who do insist upon adopting it as their philosophical stance will do anything to avoid the questions, "Of what use is it?" and "What values do we learn as a result of Determinism?" But, that is their choice.

Back to Determinianity                                     To Page Three

"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —