Jim asked:

What evidence do we have that life is not totally predetermined?

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I will assume that by "life" is meant ongoing history, the history we're all making every day through
billions of actions. I will also assume that by "totally predetermined" is meant that, given all the causal
agents (personal and impersonal) that are "in play" at any given time, the state of the universe at a
later time (the interval is irrelevant) could not have been other that what it is.

We human actors are aware of competing, incompatible possibilities for future realization. We can
envision ourselves realizing one possibility while letting others remain unrealized and working
vigorously to prevent the realization of still others. Those several possible futures exert on us varying
"pulls" or "repulsions." We deliberate upon those competing possibilities in the light of the future we
want to help bring about (or avert) and our scales of competing values. (I invite readers to verify in
themselves that these activities occur.)

Between deliberation and action there is the decision to honor one of those values. Now that decision
may not be the best that we know: we may choose a short-term over a long-term good (e.g., enjoying
"just one more" cigarette even though one knows that one must quit smoking). Or we may indeed
choose the best that we know, even if the attraction of the lesser good is more psychologically
compelling (e.g., quitting cigarettes "cold turkey," foregoing "just one more" puff despite the relief the
latter would bring). Either way, we exercise our freedom to will one or another possible future.

This teleological or end-oriented dynamism (in which personal agents envision alternative futures,
deliberate upon them, decide among them, and act to realize the one decided upon) is the stuff of
"life," the ongoing history we're all making. This dynamism, which is active even in the formation of
individual scales of value that guide future decision-making, does not "fit" in a universe of total
predetermination. The idea of this dynamism does not cohere with the idea of a universe
characterized exclusively by efficient ("push from behind") causality.

The evidence delivered by our experience of the world with ourselves in itsuggests that life is not
"totally predetermined" in the stipulated sense. The intellectually safer bet is on a world view that
includes determination by envisioned possible futures.The envisionings are not efficient causal
agents or operators that make things happen, but lures that evoke free responses.

Tony Flood