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Determinism
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Determinism is the theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes that preclude free will and the possibility that humans could have acted otherwise. The theory holds that the Universe is utterly rational because complete knowledge of any given situation assures that unerring knowledge of its future is ... possible. Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, in the 18th century framed the classical formulation of this thesis. For him, the present state of the Universe is the effect of its previous state and the cause of the state that follows it. If a mind, at any given moment, could know all of the forces operating in nature and the respective positions of all its components, it would thereby know with certainty the future and the past of every entity, large or small. The Persian poet Omar Khayyam expressed a similar deterministic view of the world in the concluding half of one of his quatrains: "And the first Morning of Creation wrote / What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read."
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Determinism, without being explicitly referred to, has been the ideal of mechanics since the seventeenth century. Projected onto objects made to satisfy the demand for causality, determinism ended up requiring that all phenomena satisfy the principle of ontological objectivity assumed in nature. Quantum physics... led to a retrenchment of this principle of establishing the conditions of determination, at least on the microphysical scale. Chaos theory has accentuated this point of view. In the sphere of the psyche, when Sigmund Freud attempted to explain dreams by psychoanalysis, he assumed a notion of psychic determinism in his theory of intentionality. He thus shifted the doctrine of causality in the direction of a theory of intentionality that assumed the existence of a subjective causality beyond or alongside objective causality, as shown by Pierre-Henri Castel in his introduction to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
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Determinism renders praise and blame meaningless. Similarly, if God causes all human actions, then it makes no sense to praise human beings for doing good, nor to blame them for doing evil. For if the courageous really had no choice other than to show courage, why reward it? If the evil had no choice but to commit their crime, why punish them? Rewards and punishment for moral behavior makes sense only if the actions were not caused by another.
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In The Consequences of Determinism, originally Part Three of the single-volume hardback edition, Honderich poses the following question: if determinism is true, and free will an illusion, what are the consequences? Honderich maintains that both of the entrenched and traditional doctrines about the consequences of determinism, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism, are provably false, and formulates a new answer to the question.
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Determinism may be affirmed within an atheistic view of the universe or within a theistic view. One of the commonly held views of the universe in atheistic terms is that there is nothing beyond time-space and energy-matter except ideas, including mathematical relations, and some system of such mathematical relations completely describes all the events in the universe. This is illustrated in Figure 1. Islamic theistic system is best understood by modifying the system in Figure 1 to the one in Figure 2, where the universe contains an unseen part beyond time-space and energy-matter and where the events are determined not by a mathematical system but by the will of a living God. Determinism in this second system means that all events without exception are determined completely by the will of God.
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Determinism is sometimes separated into "hard" and "soft" determinism. According to hard determinism, the deterministic perspective is true and not compatible with human freedom, moral or otherwise. Thus, humans cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.
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Determinism