“3. If determinism is true, then whatever can be done, is done. (premise)”
If determinism is true, then it is true, there’s no free will, so you can’t believe in something… say hypothetical. 
But who ever told you determinism is true?
Try to follow Charles S. Peirce’s logic.
http://www.nothing.com
Logic told me it was true.
Who ever told you that you had to have free will to believe in something?
By the way, that link is just another example of how you can use a lack of precision in language to make nonsense.
It usually goes like this:
“The word A is kind of a synonym for the word B which is loosely connected to the word C which is contradictory to the word A. So A actually contradicts itself!”
The reason these statements aren’t writen in logic system form is that they never work there. Becuase they’re nonsense. Some simple-minded people mistake these statements for real philosophy because they hold the belief that:
Confusing=Profound Truth
But in reality there’s no more truth to it then some pot-smoking epiphany like:
“The yoke of the egg is everything that’s not the white. But the opposite of white is black. The yoke is yellow, so black and yellow are the same thing…dude, pass the bong…”
So h2o, did you even read the first rubuttal? When premises 1 and 2 don’t work, you don’t get to add a third one. Maybe you should work on defending the first two…
I never said that. I only said you need free will to believe something HYPOTHETICAL. Because we suppose that the flying saucers example was just to replace anything of which you have no direct proof. Something that logics says it shouldn’t be.
Tell an ignorant that there’s oxygen on Mars, and he might believe you, he might not believe you. This is a matter of free will.
And yes, those logical essays, or proofs, however you might call them, on free will/determinism are based on such tricks of logic. Take it logically, and you can make black be white.
Personally, I believe that free will <=> existence of good and evil, morality.
A wise person is hungry for truth, while the fool feeds on trash.
–Proverbs 15:14
You’re a class act, AG.
Let me know when you open a charm school. I want to short your stock.
(Sorry. I was determined to say that.)
lol, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, 'cause I’m unfamiliar with the term “short your stock”…
Wow… A determinist quoting from the Bible…
This is a direct cut & paste from a post I made to the newsgroups a while back
I believe that if we knew all the rules of
the universe and could measure every atom in our body we could now the
actions of a person or what they were thinking.
I would say you’re a believer in predetermination them? As this is what you seem to imply from that statement. We don’t have freewill as we live out a series of calculations where none of the variables are unknown or random. Life is a process of 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. Would this be a fair definition?
Why does a certain unique DNA chain make me or
why is H2O water or 12 electrons make carbon? The fact that certain
arrangements of matter make things. The rules of the universe are
consistent and there is seemingly endless variety
Or why do we live in a Universe that follows rules, which would seem to require more effort to create, then a random universe? This is one of the five proofs for the existence of God give by Aquinas. (i.e. the world as its created follows order not chaos).
I’ve thought about this problem for a long time and I keep coming back to the fact I just don’t have enough information to make a fair and rational decision. What it comes down to is I either believe that the Universe begot itself and always existed in some form. Or I can believe that some intelligence (most would call God) created the Universe so I can live in it for purpose that is still unknown to me. (I don’t believe a single world religion is right, but I still believe the existence of God is a valid choice).
This is a repost of an old post I made, which was talking about a Chemical Deity.
Getting back to freewill; I think there is a small randomness to the universe. Maths as we use it is still quite simple. 1 + 1 = 2, are whole numbers. 1.3 + 4.3 = 5.6, are decimal numbers (or fractions). As you know there are an infinite number or numbers. Between 1.0 and 2.0 there are also an infinites number of decimal numbers (or fractions). To recreate the universe with maths would require infinite number accuracy. Something we are not capable of yet, maybe never? But maths is also unlike anything else in the world, it is pure and incorruptible; meaning 1 + 1 will always from this day to the end of everything even beyond that, 1 + 1 will always equal 2. I don’t believe the universe lives up to this perfect accuracy. In chemical reactions (and the expending of energy) in the universe I think there is margin for error like the way in maths you round up or down at a centain number of decimals, and this error over time can create randomness. This randomness could create something along the lines of freewill. (I’m still thinking about how this works as the last step is a bit of a jump). But it would be like this: some how the human brain has found away to harness this error to allow freewill. (As a side note, this might be why computers have problems in imitation of human thought.)
PV