ABSTRACT
The puzzle about the existence of human freedom can now be given a preliminary formulation. The problem of freedom involves an apparent clash between two very fundamental ways of conceiving ourselves. Until the twentieth century, determinism was a plausible and widely accepted thesis about the world. Newton’s laws of motion, for example, are deterministic in character. Most philosophers who have written about the issue of human freedom have not worried about the implications of Quantum Theory. Determinism is an entirely different doctrine from the idea termed fatalism. Determinism says that the present determines the future; it does not say that the future is cast in stone, unaffected by what is true of the present. Determinism is entirely consistent with the idea that what happens at a later time depends on what happened earlier. Determinism does not rule out the idea that if the past had been different, the present would be different.
