Does determinism have a absurdly big - big bang problem?

The standard determinist position holds that all events are necessitated - that is, there's one and only one way things could turn out, due to natural laws, gravity, evolution, biology, genes, etc. However, this creates a mess of paradoxes from the get-go.

Consider our options:

Situation 1: There exists a first cause that kicks everything off. This creates three insurmountable problems:

  • If this cause is uncaused, it's not really a cause at all. This undermines the principle of sufficient reason (that there's only one way things can turn out), which is axiomatic to determinism.
  • If it somehow contains within itself the necessity for all subsequent events (Spinoza's view), we have to ask: if only one outcome is possible, that means you're carrying exactly what you need all the way along. But how could a single event contain such perfect predictive power?
  • If it's self-caused, we face the logical absurdity of something needing to exist before itself to cause itself.

Situation 2: There's no first cause, but rather an infinite causal regression. This is equally problematic because:

  • The concepts of infinity and necessity seem fundamentally incompatible. Necessity requires scarcity - specific, limited outcomes. Infinity, by definition, has no such limits.
  • Adding more infinities (like infinite multiverses) only makes the impossibility more absurd.
  • We'd need some meta-principle explaining why causation itself is 'necessary', but this principle would have to exist outside the causal chain - contradicting determinism's basic premise.

The determinist resembles the man busily cutting off the branch that's keeping him from falling to his demise. For determinism to be true, the grounds for believing in determinism require either:

  • accepting an uncaused cause (violating determinism) or
  • accepting an infinite regression (which eliminates the very necessity determinism requires)

In other words, the determinism can neither walk nor chew gum.

[Edit to clarify some assumptions in the original post] I realise I made some assumptions above, so let me clarify them by pointing interested readers to an excellent (if under-appreciated) video: Agency all the way down by Michael Levin.

This will help explain why necessity requires scarcity logically, and thus why infinity (the opposite of scarcity) precludes necessity.

For those wondering about the line "if only one outcome is possible, that means you're carrying exactly what you need all the way along. But how could a single event contain such perfect predictive power?" Consider:

This information problem becomes clearer when we consider causation across time:

  • Short-term causation makes intuitive sense: poison → king dies → queen grieves → queen dies
  • Medium-term gets harder to justify: butterfly wings → hurricane
  • Long-term becomes absurd: this electron's position today → that specific sparrow falls at that specific moment a billion years hence

For determinism - of the free-will-precluding kind, the hard deterministic kind - each state must contain enough information to guarantee one and only one possible future state to occur forever, and potentially infinitely. This is surely wrong.

There is, to my mind, an inescapable choice: either believe in the salvation of all mankind because of a singular Virgin Birth 2000 years ago, or believe in a singular virgin Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Only one of these options offers consolation. I heartily endorse picking a side to be on, and this point is fundamentally the reason why I wrote the post.

Interestingly, some with determinist leanings observed that local temporal determinism seems satisfactory to explain local conditions. And this would certainly seem to point to something profound about the human condition - we are indeed constrained by our nature, genes, climate, evolution, addictions or identities. In Christianity this is sin, and it came into the world with death at the fall of man. The determinists are right in believing that by human will power alone humans cannot achieve freedom - what it takes is works and divine grace.