Clinamen

"There was a time when scientists like famed Laplace idly fancied that if they knew the initial location and momentum of all the particles in the Universe, they could (theoretically at least) foretell the future and retell the past. (This, despite free will and passion, as if your next warm kiss had been set in motion some 15 thousand million years ago when the Universe began.) That's the ultimate in determinism, and however beyond our computational abilities, the logic still disturbs. Though Newtonian theory weaves a deterministic plot where every sigh results from the inexorable confluence of physical law, Quantum Mechanics happily puts a touch of chance in the hatter's clockwork. The future of even one lone electron is quite beyond prediction; the Uncertainty Principle makes it impossible to precisely know its initial conditions. So kiss whomever you like; change your mind however you will; and rest assured that physics, at least, knows that it cannot hope to calculate the future." --my physics text*

The Roman Lucretius, in the first century BC, struggled with the issue of free will and determinism. He believed that all atoms in the universe were falling. But to make room for human freedom, he postulated clinamen, or that as atoms fell, they "swerved."

Lucretius and Hecht hold the same naturalistic idea. Hecht's formulation, at least, is not an argument; it is assumption and assertion. His boldness at picking up such a controversial subject as free will and dealing with it in two paragraphs, without so much as admitting there is a controversy, astounded me. He did not seem to observe any difference between philosophy and science, either.

Lucretius and Hecht do not even leave room for God, much less start their thinking from Him.



*Physics: Algebra and Trig, Eugene Hecht, Thomson Brooks/Cole: Pacific Grove, 2003, pp. 1046-47.