Does determinism eliminate the possibility of rational thought?

On a short and fanciful foray into the world of quantum physics, I encountered the (rather philosophical) assertion that determinism makes rational thought impossible. This assertion I, as proximate to a determinist (I believe all things are logically necessitated by a single cause, God, who is the sole self-determined existence), find intriguing. I certainly don’t deny the possibility of rational thought; ought I to?

Nope.

Two possible grounds appear to me on which determinism might exclude rational thought; in neither, when investigated, will we find rationality to be more threatened by determinism than indeterminism.

First, determinism might make rational thought impossible because it removed the capacity fo that thought to be determinant. The thought process runs thus: if I am necessitously determined, I cannot assert rationality as the reason for my actions, thoughts, or decisions. It is merely a process which coincides with them; I do not choose A or B on rational determination but on cause-effect I never had a choice in.

This argument, however, is a semantic trick. ‘Rationality’ has been used when ‘autonomous free will’ is meant (equivocation). A reasoned argument can still be the process by which a decision is reached, though which it is determined, albeit a wholistic worldview will recognize that in no way is reason the only factor in decisions. The alarm here rises from the classical liberal view of man as essentially a reasoning process, a theorem of both English and French liberalism. Rationality is not being compromised; what is compromised is the self-important assertion that the complete determinant of my existence is purely me, without weight from other authorities or powers.

Second, determinism might make rational thought impossible because it raises the possibility that all human thought is merely a physically-determined hallucination, that reason and rationality are simply patterns or hallucinations of human origin, that indeed they might be entirely inconsistent with themselves (for their own value of ‘inconsistency’), with an inconsistency invisible to people purely by coincidence, by determinacy. In other words: maybe Kant?

(Kant, borrowing from previous philosophers such as Berkeley and Locke, asserted that meaning and order attach to reality by the contribution of our own minds, by which method he proposed to defeat Empiricist assertions that reality is not provably exterior to the person perceiving, while escaping the rationalist problem that a person’s reason cannot escape himself. Kant, incidentally, was a bit of a clown, with success rising from his offering a very complex, very fancy way of repeating Psalm 53:1- “The fool says in his heart: ‘There is no God….’”)

Now, determinism sans God does have that problem. Strictly speaking, rational thought might merely be a necessitated hallucination without correspondence to the outer world (as Leibniz essentially admitted, except he said, without good reason, that we have all the same hallucination). But is indeterminism any better? Indeterminism requires acausality (choices and results without reason); autonomous free will, the objective of holding to indeterminism, requires that I make choices on bases which result from nothing outside myself (in other words, that I be in part acausal). If reality is indeterminate, though, rationality does not correspond to it; even if no acausal event ever happened, their possibility removes the certainty that rationality’s match to reality will continue to exist moment-to-moment.

(Probabilities are a semantic illusion. They imply a state between ‘A’ and ‘not A’ called ‘either A or not A.’ This is either meaningless (probabilities being merely statements of ignorance, as I hold) or a direct contradiction of the Law of Noncontradiction, the fundament of logic.)

Determinism and indeterminism, therefore, both break the use of rational thought, the correspondence of reason to reality (which is reason’s only pretext for existence, unless we want to get into some weird, pseudo-Kierkegaardian philosophy).

The solution to both denials of reason is simple, and it’s the solution ever logic-using man unconsciously implements: faith. The rationalist has faith, reasonable, unreasoned, and fundamental to his thought, that reason works. (So, even if he denies it, does the empiricist.) I have faith, reasonable but not reasoned, that God is God; component to that faith in God is all which God includes: creature-Creator relationship, logic, and the reality of what is perceived (even if the percipient does not properly understand what he perceives).

In other words: Christ or chaos.

God bless.