The Universe is deterministic

Sorry for forfeiting the past 2 rounds. Remember that the burden of proof is on Pro to show that determinism is true. I'll still provide arguments against determinism, but as long as Pro's affirmative arguments are refuted, I win the debate. Unfortunately, most of Pro's round is rendered irrelevant by his own misunderstanding of what exactly determinism and free will are. As Pro himself stated in Round 1, determinism is the idea that "for every event... there exist conditions that could cause no other event." In other words, determinism doesn't give us *any* choice at all between A and B, because either A and B would already have been necessitated by antecedent conditions. There is no room for free will under determinism, because free will, by definition, implies some degree of freedom from external causal constraints. Contrary to Con's claims, free will doesn't entail the ability to choose C or D when A and B are the only available options. As long as there is a choice between A and B, then we have free will. Again, this is all in accordance with Pro's R1 definitions. Pro is attacking some strange, totally unconstrained form of free will which allows people to defy the laws of reality itself, but literally no one supports that, nor am I required to defend that in this debate. Pro's concluding statement essentially concedes the debate by admitting that limited free will exists. I agree, and that's why determinism is false. Pro also argues that the perfect, complex design of the universe mandates determinism, but it's a complete non-sequitur. There's no link between apparent fine-tuning and determinism. The universe could also have deterministically developed to be "imperfect" (whatever that means) and lifeless. There is no reason to believe that determinism provides a more likely context for the universe to be the way it is than indeterminism. Reject this incredibly underdeveloped argument. So none of Pro's arguments actually show that the universe is deterministic. This alone is reason enough to vote Con, but let's also examine some positive reasons to reject determinism. (1) Quantum Mechanics Scientific inquiry into quantum mechanics has revealed that at reality's smallest scales, determinism is most definitely false. There are numerous discoveries which support this. First and foremost, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle shows that "the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory. The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature" [1]. In other words, it isn't possible for a particle's movements to be fully determined by its antecedent conditions because their antecedent conditions are not fully defined to begin with -- their movements necessarily occur with some degree of randomness. Another proof of indeterminism comes from virtual particles, which have been empirically observed to randomly appear & disappear without any cause or explanation at all. In fact, these "quantum fluctuations" are constantly occurring throughout vacuums, and positive energy density is widely known to be a definite property of empty space [2]. Most importantly, electron movements in atoms have long been known to be spontaneous and acausal -- the best that physicists have been able to do to describe electrons' locations is calculating probability distributions (i.e. there is X% chance of finding Y electron at Z location). There have been various attempts at explaining the movements of electrons in a deterministic manner, collectively known as "hidden variable theories," but they rely on violations of Occam's Razor -- in order to remain sound, they have to assume the existence of variables for which there is no evidence whatsoever. On top of that, most hidden variable theories have already been shown to be impossible by John Neumann's statistical proofs. The only one that hasn't is Bohmian Mechanics, and not even its own developer thought that it was likely to be true: "Bohm's original aim was not to make a serious counterproposal but simply to demonstrate that hidden-variable theories are indeed possible... Bohm said he considered his theory to be unacceptable as a physical theory due to the guiding wave's existence in an abstract multi-dimensional configuration space, rather than three-dimensional space" [3]. The takeaway from all this is that science has definitively refuted determinism. (2) Free will exists To make this point, I will be utilizing a pragmatist approach to epistemology, which functions primarily off of prima facie justification, falsificationism, and abductive reasoning. I will only further justify this approach if Pro takes issue with it. From a prima facie standpoint, it's incredibly obvious that free will exists -- ALL of us consciously experience decision-making at literally every instant of our lives. Given this, under pragmatism, we should only doubt that free will exists if given an overriding reason which falsifies our prima facie notion of its existence. It's Pro's job to provide that overriding reason. However, pretty much all free will deniers attempt to derive overriding reasons from neurology, so I'll offer a pre-emptive rebuttal to that general approach. Even a cursory glance at the state of modern neuroscience reveals that it's a vastly incomplete field. Neurologists haven't managed to explain even phenomena as fundamental as consciousness -- little progress has been made in filling in the gap between our subjective, first-person mental states and our physical, third-person brain states. Given that we have such limited knowledge of how the brain functions, it becomes rather silly to appeal to neurology in an attempt at overriding the tremendous prima facie justification of free will's existence. Therefore, free will probably exists, which once again refutes determinism. The resolution is negated - 1. http://abyss.uoregon.edu... 2. http://www.sciencedaily.com... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org...