Did you choose to press play, or was that action determined by a chain of events set in motion billions of years ago? This deep dive tackles free will, a puzzle on which our justice system, our moral blame, and our sense of achievement all depend. We begin inside the invisible cage of causal determinism, picturing the universe as a multidimensional web of dominoes, and follow it to Laplace's demon, the theoretical intellect that could calculate every future breakfast from the position of every particle. We then discover that theologians hit the same wall first, from al-Ashari's theory of kasb or acquisition in Islam to Calvin's predestination and Aquinas's synergism.

The episode maps the major camps: hard determinists like Baron d'Holbach who call free will an illusion, metaphysical libertarians armed with Peter van Inwagen's consequence ar ...