There is another possibility, Mike. Instead of a flower pot hitting someone on the head; which isn't very useful, consider getting a herd of cattle to Montana in, say, 1870. The ranch had been purchased and a nice herd has been purchased in Texas. It has been determined by the ranch owner that this herd gets to his ranch. But the cattle aren't going to get their on their own; so a trail boss is required. He knows how to do it. He hires a few helpers and they drive the herd to Montana. Your Catholic school teachers might agree with this. God did indeed create the universe but not as the Deists believed, not as a hands-off universe that needed no further attention but as a hands-on universe that required attention from time to time. He didn't need to create the cattle. He'd already created them (using the evolutionary process that we love so well), but now they needed a little help to get where they needed to be. In other words, who says that the universe needs to be utterly chaotic or utterly ordered? Lawrence _____ From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mike Geary Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2006 8:32 AM To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Final Finger of Fate A.A. >>There is cause and effect, absolutely. Beyond cause and effect, inevitability has a supernatural quality to it, such as Robert Paul mentioned. If you're walking down the street and a flower pot falls on your head because a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil, is it inevitable that it hit *you* and not the guy in back of you? That's luck. Physics is the pot falls down and not up. That it hits you is no reason at all, just luck.<< Apparently it's the word 'fate' that disturbs you, so let's leave it aside and use the word 'determined'. In a determined universe there's no such thing as chance or randomness (your 'luck'). Using your flowerpot scenario, the fact that the flowerpot hits the person it hits is because THAT person was there. THAT person was there and not another person because THAT person and no other was THERE in that spot at that moment. And THAT person was there as the consequence of a very specific chain of events. So, too, the flowerpot falls as a consequence of a very specific chain of events -- the two events coincide. Determinism, as I understand it, holds that in the first nano second of existence all the history of the universe was cast, we're just going through the inevitable motions now. That's not a universe I want to live in, but I don't see how it can be otherwise. I don't see how randomness or chance could possibly exist and there still be a universe. What seems to us chaos and open-endedness is merely the almost infinite variables that go into every equation. If one knew the position and momentum of every particle of existence at that first moment of existence then one could know the future. Then one might be able to affect the future. Failing that we have to live with the illusion that the world is open to our control. This is my thinking at this point in any event. Mike Geary