heredity, rather than predetermined. Predeterminism necessarily implies, at the very least, a passive but all-knowing observer, if not an active planner, designer, or manipulator (of the fetus's personal characteristics). This basic scientific idea of hereditary determination, though, already fulfills the definition of causal determinism, a metaphysical concept. While determinism usually refers to a naturalistically explainable causality of events, predeterminism seems by definition to suggest a person or a "someone" who is controlling or planning the causality of events before they occur and who then perhaps resides beyond the natural, causal universe. This creates a definitional conflict because predeterminism, by this understanding, logically leads to a belief in the existence of a conscious being who must determine all actions and events in advance and who, possessing such seeming omnipotence, almost certainly operates outside of the laws of nature. This conscious entity is probably, then, a being who is omnipotent as well as presumably supernatural and omniscient. The definitional confusion here is that there is already a name for this very concept: predestination. Predestination asserts that a supremely powerful being has, in advance, fixed all events and outcomes in the universe; it is a famous doctrine of the Calvinists in Christian theology. Likewise, the doctrine of fatalism already explicitly attributes all events and outcomes to the will of a (vaguer) higher power such as fate or destiny. Furthermore, in philosophic debates about the compatibility of free will and determinism, some argue that predeterminism back to the origin of the universe is simply what philosophers mean by the more common term "determinism." Others have suggested that the term "self-determination" be used to describe actions as merely "determined" by an agent's reasons, motives, and desires. When various interpretation of the word predeterminism can be defined even better by other terms, such as the aforementioned determinism, predestination, or fatalism, then the definition of predeterminism itself appears awkward, unclear, and perhaps even worthless in terms of practical or philosophic discussion. R. E. Hobart R. E. Hobart is the pseudonym of Dickinson S. Miller, a student of William James who was later one of James' closest personal friends and for some years a colleague in the Harvard philosophy department. Hobart (Miller) criticized the core idea of James' The Will to Believe, namely that it was acceptable to hold religious faith in the absence of evidence for or against that faith. James referred to Miller as "my most