We are all scientists. Life presents us with one problem after another. Each day, we concern ourselves with cause and effect. Each day, we speculate about the reasons for the actions that surround us. We believe that certain actions produce certain effects. Whenever we depend on finding a relationship between cause and effect, we demonstrate belief in causality. To the extent that we believe that causes must be real, material aspects of the world, we profess the philosophy of determinism.

But there is an opposed philosophy, indeterminism, the belief that some effects may not have material causes. We are born indeterminists, knowing little of the causes of effects. It is only by interacting with the real world that we become determinists, in essence, applying the scientific method to all aspects of existence. As we grow, we discard ignorance based on superstition for knowledge based on experience. The process necessarily involves a perpetual conflict between these two ways of viewing the world; each person and each society professes a philosophy containing elements of both.

Once again, the time has come to examine determinism and indeterminism in a systematic way and to choose wisely between them. The compromises with indeterminism that scientists have concocted since the nineteenth century are getting stale-they are becoming an impediment to progress. Cosmologists have become cosmogonists, naively assuming and unabashedly promulgating the ancient idea that the universe itself had an origin, even though the creation of something from nothing is a religious assumption, not a scientific one. Physicists say that gravitation is due to the "curvature" of "spacetime," but we have trouble imagining how either of these could be. Chemists claim that the universe is becoming more disordered each day, implying that it will eventually end in chaos. Most of our citizens are still enamored with occult

beliefs ranging from the psychic to the astrological. From a strictly scientific perspective, our efforts to appease the religionists have borne strange fruit indeed.

To put science and philosophy back on track, I propose a reopening of the debate between science and religion, which I present here as the struggle between determinism and indeterminism. To be gained from this new rift is a better understanding of the necessarily elusive foundations upon which we build our thought and interpret the external world. To be gained is an improved, internally consistent, and scientific way of viewing the world. Any step in this direction would help us control the technology our culture has spawned.