[gumpzilla]

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Why, because he's predetermined not to give it to them, of course.

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Naturally.

A bit more about free will: I sometimes wonder if it is significant that even in a completely deterministic world, the future is still inherently unknowable by humans. To expand on what I mean by this, predicting the future perfectly is going to require perfect knowledge of the state of the universe. There are several barriers to this:

1) Knowing the state of the universe requires measurements. Measurements have imprecision. Slight variation in initial conditions -> huge difference in the resulting world a little bit later.

2) More cosmologically, suppose I shake a fistful of electrons around at the sun. Nobody on Earth gets to know about this for 8 minutes. So my predictions for what happens 8 minutes in the future must be lacking some information. What if we knew the state of the sun perfectly? Well, I already stated that's impossible, but if you don't believe that, humans are always going to have spread their influence over a limited volume of the universe, and you can just pick some point that has been as yet unmolested and make this argument again.

So, the question is, is it philosophically important that even in a world that is deterministic, humans can't ever figure it out? I suspect it might be.