Why is Randomness so Hard to Prove?

[atrifix]

Well, I don't think motion is a requisite, but I get what you're saying. The car is a bad example, though, because although it's "stopped", it's still in motion. There are forces acting on it, the most important being gravity, which keeps it from floating away. And it moves at approximately the speed of the earth, whether you're driving it or stopped at a red light.

Maybe this will help you grasp determinism: imagine (assume) that your body is made up entirely of fundamental particles which are atoms. All cells, synapses, beliefs, motions, choices, are reducible to a big, finite number of atoms. Each atom doesn't have free will--it's influenced entirely by the laws of physics (causal or probabilistic). What determinism says is that the whole cannot be larger than the sum of its parts. If you're made up of atoms, you follow the same physical laws atoms follow. Since the atoms don't have free will, you don't have free will.

If that doesn't help, this is how I would formulate determinism logically: Let H be a true proposition expressing a state of the world at some time t0 before any agents existed, let L be the set of all true conjoined natural laws, and let P be a true proposition which describes the state of the world now. Determinism says that (necessarily) (H & L -> P). From this, along with a few other assumptions, you can deduce that you have no choice about P.

You may still disagree, but I hope that at least makes determinism clear.