A New Version of the Mind Argument Refuted

Abstract

Peter van Inwagen attempts to demonstrate the apparent incompatibility of free will and indeterminism through an imaginative thought experiment. He imagines God repeatedly “rolling the world back” to its state one minute prior to the performance of an undetermined, putatively free action and then letting it “go forward” again. Van Inwagen argues that the outcome most friendly to the supposition that the agent acted freely, in which she does otherwise about half the time, is one which apparently shows that her original act was a matter of chance, and thus not free. I argue that neither this outcome nor any other implies that her action was not free.