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Comment and Life

Humans beings are actors, not puppets

By Dorothy Rowe

2 February 2005

THE Bible says you have free will and you can choose to do whatever you like, but if you make a choice God doesn’t approve of, He’ll clobber you. Most scientists, on the other hand, argue that what you do is nothing but the end result of a long chain of causes over which you have no control worth talking about. Who is right? Are we agents capable of acting on the world any way we choose or puppets dangling off biochemistry’s strings?

Actually neither really fits our daily experience. In my work as a psychologist one of the big…

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