Determinism, Indeterminism and Their Implications
Newtonian mechanics proved an enormously powerful way
of describing moving bodies. A century after Newton Pierre Simon de Laplace
(1749-1827) showed among other things how the solar system could have arisen
without divine intervention. He went on to claim that an ‘intelligence’ possessing complete knowledge of the
position and momentum of every body in the universe would be able to predict
all future states of that universe. In other words, that the cosmos is deterministic. Laplace’s ‘intelligence’
was a mathematical fiction. But the problem of determinism challenges our
instinct that we ourselves as humans are able to make choices about the future,
that we are to some extent ‘free’ agents. Indeed determinism raises problems as
to how God could either enter into any sort of real relationship with humans,
or indeed guide the material world towards divine purposes.
It is enough to note here the conviction of
many thinkers in this field that this is not a wholly determined world, but one
in which the laws and processes God has created can give rise to novel
structures through the operation of chance, and that God can co-operate with
those developments, and relate to the conscious beings to which evolution has
ultimately given rise. So Keith Ward writes:
there can only be an open future if there
is a degree of indeterminism. There can only be the sort of freedom that is
morally important if there is an open future, at least sometimes. So
indeterminism is a necessary condition of the later development of morally
important freedom in rational beings.
Email
link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr.
Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the
Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
|
