Peter Van Inwagen Free Fate Analysis

The Obscurities of Free Will In Peter Van Inwagen’s book, Metaphysics, he presents several positions concerning free will and determinism. For Van Inwagen, free will is something that is commonly conscious and inevitable for most people. However, it is hard to understand how each position can have such a complex mystery, as he presents it. Van Inwagen is convoluting the concepts of free will and determinism with unnecessary layers of mystery. Moreover, the certainty of only having one, predetermined future is a concept that does not sit well with many people. Personally, I have a problem with only having one possible future though, that is where the mystery I found lies.

Van Inwagen challenges compatibilism and incompatibilism, two positions which seek to organize and

The first perspective compatibilism, which suggests that the two are aligned and produce untouchable facts, making it seem that the future is open to you. In contrast to compatibilism is incompatibilism, which suggests that free will and determinism are incompatible and that if one component is true, the other must be false. Compatibilist have a reputation to explain their position in a straightforward way, when that very well is not the matter. Van Inwagen argues against the position of a compatibilist because some facts are not untouchable; that is to say that we only sometimes have the ability to act differently. This is a mystery because it is not concrete and is incalculable. The logic behind untouchable facts is explained as the Principle, “Suppose it's an untouchable fact that p. And suppose also that the following conditional (if-then) statement expresses an untouchable fact: IF p is an untouchable fact, and if if p, then q is an untouchable fact, then q is an untouchable fact” (274-275). He argues that compatibilists hide their mystery under the rug but everyone, including compatibilists themselves, know it is there which, for