It’s my decision – or is it?
This month, I’ve decided to write about free will. I could have chosen to write about other topics, and if you want to know what these might have been, then you’ll have to wait for future issues of the Catholic Herald. But the claim that I could have chosen from a variety of different topics turns out to be rather controversial.
In 1814, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace published a philosophical essay on probabilities in which he said that if a great intellect knew at a certain moment in time all the positions of every particle in the universe and all the forces that acted between them, then to such an intellect, nothing about the fut-ure would be uncertain – everything would be completely determined. This great intellect has come to be known as Laplace’s demon. Those who endorse the underlying principle behind Laplace’s demon would say that given the configuration of all the particles and forces in my brain and their interactions with all the other particles in the universe at a particular time, perhaps years in the past, it necessarily follows that I had to write about free will today. My perception that I made a choice in the matter is just an illusion, so they say.
