Some Latter-day Saints (and many others) believe that the future is entirely predictable if one just knew the current state right now. This concept is called causal determinism and, if too intently followed, creates ideas like fixed-future omniscience, predestination, and antagonism towards free-will or Agency. Of course, many events can be predicted in a causal chain, which allows science to progress and humans to reason about the future. However, fanatical focus on causal determinism would argue that when the first living cell formed on earth that my lunch order on Wednesday was determined for my October 23, 2020 order.

Talmage on determinism

Latter-day Saints are prompted into this deterministic reasoning by a quote from Elder James E. Talmage.

Our Heavenly Father has a full knowledge of the nature and disposition of each of His children, a knowledge gained by long observation and experience in the past eternity of our primeval childhood; a knowledge compared with which that gained by earthly parents through mortal experience with their children is infinitesimally small. By reason of that surpassing knowledge, God reads the future of child and children, of men individually and of men collectively as communities and nations; He knows what each will do under given conditions, and sees the end from the beginning. His foreknowledge is based on intelligence and reason. He foresees the future as a state which naturally and surely will be; not as one which must be because He has arbitrarily willed that it shall be.” - James E. Talmage Great Apostasy, pp. 20 -

The critical difference is how far we extend Elder Talmage’s metaphor of a parent knowing the consequence of their children’s actions. The scientific method on which he reason’s God’s capabilities is not held to the standard that one causal moment creates a chain of events so long that its knowledge precisely defines all eternity and space. If that were true, then even God could not exercise His omnipotence once the first action is taken. However, we believe that part of God’s omnipotence is that He can act and not be acted upon at any moment in time. That freedom is what He wants for each of His children. We are here to learn that our lives can be caused by our choices under the umbrella of His divine providence, not solely by our past, our family’s history, or the universe’s past.

Pinnock on determinism

Clark H. Pinnock highlights the issue between determinism and free-will in the following excerpt;

That man is free we may be confident, as confident as we are that man is capable of knowing. for unless man is free, capable of some kind of genuine creative act, then he cannot know. He can only react, and his supposed awareness that he can react is only another reaction, and so on endlessly … ‘Determinism is not, and never was, a working philosophy of life. One can conceivably die by it; no one ever consistently lived by it. if people would reflect more simply and sincerely on their actual experience of living they would be less vulnerable to a great deal of academic nonsense, and philosophy would be the gainer. In essence determinism [phililosphical or theological] is one of those theories which, as Professor Broad said of behaviorism, ‘are so preposterously silly that only very learned men could have taught of them.’ Whether or not we are, in fact, free is a question only for those who wish to play games with concepts. Once we see what the question is, we see that the very possibility of considering it as a question to which true or false answers may be given presupposes the fact of freedom. (Pg 84)

William James on determinism and chance

William James provides further insight into this contradiction between determinism and free will. I appreciate his definition of determinism.

[Determinism] professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities bidden in its womb; the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.

Later he provides insight into the alternate view of causal determinism

Determinism denies the ambiguity of future volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous. But we have said enough to meet the issue. Indeterminate future volitions do mean chance. Let us not fear to shout it from the house-tops if need be; for we now know that the idea of chance is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift.

Somehow most are repelled by using the word chance in the same context as God’s plan. William James explains how we should view chance. Chance gives ‘us no information about that of which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with something else’ and he explains that chance is ’not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other things in advance of its own actual presence.’ He then arrives at the definition of chance that lines up with my view of agency.

All you mean by calling it “chance” is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise.

Extreme determinism doesn’t work

One of the key elements of agency is that the path is not guaranteed, that the future may also fall out otherwise. The idea of agency is the idea of a gift, for unless we can choose and are capable of genuine creative acts, then we cannot be. God wants us to learn to be nurturing creators who realize that each relationship may fall out otherwise without our careful attention in time. Our life and our relationships are not caused but created.

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