Free will and determinism constitute the poles in the great dialectic in Western theology and are at the core of Western philosophy, including Anglo-American jurisprudence. It is from the perspective of the latter, so influenced as it is by the former two, that I examined the murder of Bian Zhongyun in Beijing, China on August 5, 1966.
The American philosopher Nelson Goodman's take on the dialectic was this: God is the collective conscience of mankind. That is, God is man's soul, not a deity. Below is another view on the dialectic. This is Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. It is not well-argued (or so say I) even though it is Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. It seems to me consistent with Goodman's view:
To the question: What causes historic events? another answer presents itself, namely, that the course of world events is predetermined from on high, and depends on the coincidence of the wills of all who participate in those events, and that the influence of a Napoleon on the course of such events is purely superficial and imaginary.
...[H]uman dignity, which tells me that each of us is, if not more, at least not less a man than the great Napoleon, demands the acceptance of that solution of the question...
At the battle of Borodino Napoleon did not fire a shot and did not kill anyone. All that was done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who did the killing.
Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and would have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable.
...[I]t was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders was executed...So the way in which those men slaughtered one another was not determined by Napoleon's will, but occurred independently of him, in accord with the wills of hundreds of thousands of men... (pp. 942-43)
Image: Battle of Borodino (artist unknown (to me)).
