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Philosophy of determinism

It is a popular misconception that determinism necessarily entails that humanity or individual humans have no influence on the future and its events (a position known as Fatalism); however, determinists believe that the level to which human beings have influence over their future is itself dependent on present and past.

Causal determinism is associated with, and relies upon, the ideas of Materialism and Causality. Some of the philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Steven M. Cahn, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Baron d'Holbach (Paul Heinrich Dietrich), Pierre-Simon Laplace, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche and, more recently, John Searle, Ted Honderich, and Daniel Dennett.

Mecca Chiesa notes that the probabilistic or selectionistic determinism of B.F. Skinner comprised a wholly separate conception of determinism that was not mechanistic at all. A mechanistic determinism would assume that every event has an unbroken chain of prior occurrences, but a selectionistic or probabilistic model does not.
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism
I like to think that I am not the object of mechanistic determinism.

Of course there are somatologiocal (physical) factors; and there are also psychological (the influences of others, and of circumstances). However, there is, also, what I call the pneumatological factor. I am not just a puppet dangling on the strings, of nature and nurture, of my heredity and/or environment. I believe there is what I call pneumature. As a spiritual, or a pneumatological being, I have the power to choose how I will let the soma and the psyche factors affect me.


G~O~D--Now & ForeverIS:Nature, Nurture & PNEUMA-ture, Thanks to Warren Farr&ME AT www.unitheist.org