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Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett Viking, New York, 2003. 363 pp. $24.95, C$37.50. ISBN 0-670-03186-0
Next to the question of God's existence there is arguably no greater conundrum in Western thought than the problem of free will and determinism, and the two questions are inextricably interdigitated. God's omniscience and omnipotence means that the future is foreordained and predetermined, which precludes free will. If we are volitional beings, then God is limited in knowledge, power, or both.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes suggested one way out. He claimed that we are sufficiently intelligent to recognize the infinite power of God but not intelligent "enough to comprehend how he leaves the free actions of men indeterminate" (1). The English author C. S. Lewis simply placed God outside of time and argued that the fact God knows what one is doing at a given moment does not make one's actions any less free (2). But removing God does not resolve the problems of free will and determinism.
In the early 19th century, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace codified the mechanistic world view of Newton and Descartes in what has since become known as Laplace's demon: an intelligence that at a given instant knew all forces acting in nature and the position of all particles and that was capable of subjecting all these data to mathematical analysis. "Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence. The past and the future would be present to its eyes" (3). By the 20th century, science undertook to become that demon, casting a wide "causal net" that linked causes to effects throughout the past and into the future and encompassed all phenomena throughout the cosmos from atoms to galaxies. God and nature became deterministically indistinguishable.
Why, then, do we feel free? What nontheological solutions have been proposed to slay the demon of determinism? The simplest is also the most subjectively appealing: I have free will and you don't. This useful fiction serves us well in daily life and most of us act as if it is true, but it is philosophically unsatisfying. At the other extreme is the claim that the problem is a "mysterian" mystery, a problem we can conceive but not solve. For such mysteries, pragmatist...